You’ve made all the right SEO moves and your SERP position reflects that. Your PPC campaign is converting nicely, which results in a steady customer base. To supplement your budding revenue, you’d also like to sell web real estate for ad purposes, but you have to prove the amount of traffic you receive is what you say it is. How do you go about this?
How Do You Prove Your Traffic? 
If you are using a hosting company, they should be able to provide traffic statistics. However, potential advertisers are not able to view this data directly because of security reasons. What options do you have to relay your traffic information to potential advertisers? This topic was brought up at the SitePoint.com forums by a poster named Spridel.
Spridel wondered what methods could be used to inform advertisers of the information they are requesting. The majority of the quick answers were, for Spridel, take a screenshot of the statistic log and send it to the company. The problem with this tactic is the information on the image can be faked. A poster by the name of billiousness offered this advice:
“A screen shot given by the publisher of smaller websites to an advertiser as people have previously said is sufficient but for publishers chasing a major advertisers you need to either serve your ads via a 3rd party or have third party stats. Big company’s marketing staff, media buyers and ad agency types are used to having 3rd party verification of circulation or ratings from traditional media outlets like print or broadcast and need it to justify spending to their account departments/boards”
How does one go about getting GOOD 3rd party verification of traffic? Poster Anat gave a really thoughtful suggestion concerning free ad placement for a limited basis. Anat said, “If the screenshots aren’t enough – you can suggest that they serve the image of the ad from their server. Then they can analyze their own logs to see how many adviews they actually had. If they have any decent stats software, they can also see how much traffic you sent them.”
However, if its hard statistical data you need, other posters had different advice for Spridel and others to consider. Two posters, JakeCop and Corobori, suggested using a 3rd party company to analyze your traffic. Both of them created a login account for advertisers, giving them limited access to the traffic data.
Of course, proving your traffic may not be that important, at least in poster Dnyarri’s point of view. If ad companies don’t trust you enough to believe your traffic amount, they probably wouldn’t trust a screenshot either. As for proving traffic, Dnyarri explains this may not be an issue by saying:
“I really don’t think the number of hits your site gets is all that important. Now that’s with one caveat… if you’re selling 10k impressions and only get 100 page views a month, clearly that’s not going to work. But as long as you get the hits to cover your base, people will be more concerned about the hits that THEY’RE getting, ie: that you’re not overselling.
Otherwise. The amount of traffic you get is relatively moot.”
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
