New metric available

Last week we made the Visitor rate available as a metric in all of our dashboards. In this post I’ll explain to you why we decided to add this feature and how you could use it in your analysis.

Combining two metrics
Earlier this year we implemented the Panel activity graph which is used to track the movement of your panel over time. This data is used by panelmanagers who need to keep their panel at a steady size. But it is also a valuable tool when doing analyses in the dashboard.

For example when you are looking at a graph for unique visitors over time and you see a sudden spike in the number of unique visitors. To explain this spike, first thing you should check is whether there was also a spike in active participants at that time. If there is no spike you can do further analysis to find another explanation for the spike in traffic.

To simplify this usecase we’ve combined the unique visitors and active participants into one metric called Visitor rate. For each period we calculate the visitor rate by taking the unique visitors as a percentage of the active participants. This results in a relative metric that will stay stable when the panel size changes in size.

Why not reach?
For some of you this may sound as a familiar metric: reach. However we realized that to measure actual reach you need to correct the data for biases and other factors.

First of all the number of active trackers in a period may not accurately represent the panel size at that time. For instance, participants may be on holiday for a week and would not use a computer. Technically they are still part of the panel but they are not counted as active participants for that week.

Secondly you’d want to apply some kind of weigthing model when you want to report on the entire online population. Commonly you would want to correct for socio-demographics, but with our data it is also possible to correct for heavy- or light-internet-users.

Currently we are doing research on what’s the best way to project results in the dashboard to the total online population. If we have any news on this subject we will of course let you know about our findings.

Menno van der Sman – Developer