Clint Watson writes in  Facebook Like Button Count Inaccuracies:

The Facebook “like” buttons you see embedded on websites incorrectly report the number of “people” who “like” something. Specifically, the button can inflate the displayed count of people.  While this is fine when all you want to do is track some general level of “engagement” with a particular item, it was not accurate for the use I needed – counting each “like” as a vote in our BoldBrush Online painting competition.

What I needed is a way to get the number of actual people who “like” something.  And there is a way to retreive that information from Facebook, but it is often a different number from what is shown on the “like” button itself.

If you are a geek – here’s the bottom line of this post:

If you’re using the Facebook “Like” Button Social Plugin and you need an accurate count of the actual number of people who have clicked the “like” button, you can’t rely on the number reported by the button itself.  You need to retrieve your URL’s “fan count” number via Facebook’s Open Graph API.

Hat tip to Zach Seward for bringing this to my attention.

I got pretty confused when I couldn’t immediately replicate on Alexa the results of the searches Susan linked to there. Alexa appeared to be displaying some very different types of information from what Susan’s story described.

Finally, I realized that, at least on a Mac, the information that Alexa displays for site statistics can vary by browser.

Here’s an example…

I’m a Mac user. Just now I searched Alexa for site statistics on Contentious.com. My preferred web browser is Firefox, but I’ve also been experimenting with Chrome.

Here’s what I saw on Alexa via Firefox:

alexa contentious ff

In contrast, here’s what I saw when I did the same search at at the same time via the Safari browser:

alexa contentious safari

I did a test on a friend’s Windows PC, and Internet Explorer for Windows showed Alexa data the same way Safari did.

Susan tends to use Safari; so when I tried to replicate her searches in Firefox and Chrome, I thought something was wrong. Finally I figured out that this was a browser issue.

I have no explanation for this — although I’m curious why this happens. (Readers, if you know the answer, please comment below.) I’m just saying, if you use Alexa, and you’re not seeing the kind of site statistics you wanted, try using a different browser.

Newspaper publishers and advertising managers routinely toss around print and online readership numbers — but sometimes in ways that don’t make sense, and that might even miss opportunities to build revenue, business, and community.

Yesterday Dan Thornton, community marketing manager at Bauer Media, explained why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to Web site statistics.

It all boils down to this…

Thornton points out that in the UK, sales figures for print copies of the Guardian and Observer newspapers typically are multiplied by three to take into account shared readership, based on circulation research. However, online readership statistics generally fail to account for online reading that happens beyond the news organization’s Web site…

“It’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products,” he writes. But, “I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly …is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.”

Thornton suggests that if your newspaper factors shared readership into your print circulation, then to be fair you should also try to estimate how many people encounter your online news without ever logging into your site as a visitor. This includes people who:

• Block cookies
• Use a feed reader or personal home page (like MyYahoo)
• Get news or headlines via social media or news aggregators
• Access mobile or cached versions of your news (which often aren’t estimated adequately)
• Read reposts of news stories elsewhere online

According to Thornton, “There’s a big elephant in the news room. Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?”

Therefore: If you think your online readership (as estimated by direct Web site traffic) only represents only a small percentage of your estimated print circulation — think again. When considering the future of your business, how many people visit your site ultimately may be less relevant than how many people connect with your news content and brand via any online or mobile channel.

I think Thornton has a good point. The catch is recognizing the opportunities inherent in this broader view, and (in the short term) communicating that value effectively to advertisers and other potential partners.

…As a side note, to illustrate how diverse online distribution of your content can build your brand and attract readers, I first heard about Thornton and his post via this OJaggregator tweet, a headline service from fellow Tidbits contributor Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog, which republished Thornton’s article. A link from that repost led me to Thornton’s blog, The Way of the Web. I liked what I saw there so much that I’ve subscribed to that blog’s RSS feed and am now following Thornton on Twitter. So he’s now part of my regular fodder for Tidbits, my own blog Contentious, and to pass along to my nearly 3,300 Twitter followers.

Which goes to show how potential ripple effects from distributed online or mobile encounters with your content (even just your headlines) can yield surprising benefits to your brand. Thus, trying to be too controlling about where and how your content appears online can work against you in the big picture.

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Here’s his line of reasoning. I think he makes a very going point….

First, Zuckerman quoted this comment left by Joshua Jeffryes on a 2007 Publishing 2.0 post. Jeffryes wrote:

“When I worked in advertising the ineffectiveness of advertising was hardly a secret. But customers couldn’t measure the effectiveness of ads. So they paid and continue to pay ridiculous prices for them. Online ads, on the other hand, are measurable. They work just as well, if not better, than print, television, etc., the difference is that for the first time ad customers know exactly how ineffective they are.”

From that, Zuckerman observed: “Basically, there are two ways to explain the disparity in online and offline ad cost. One is to argue that paper ads are, for some combination of reasons, ten to a hundred times more effective than online ads. The other is to argue that advertisers are better at pricing online ads than offline ads.”

Zuckerman continued: “Let’s posit for a moment that the price of newspaper ads may have more to do with how much money a newspaper needs to earn to keep the presses running, rather than how effective they are at producing new business for advertisers. …Why are advertisers willing to pay these prices without strong evidence that they give an effective yield? They may not have much choice — other options in a community where many customers are offline are also pay per impression and may be similarly expensive. …Without good methods to track the effectiveness of the print ads, [a paper's] ability to sell ads may have more to do with comparable ad rates in other local newspapers or radio stations.

“So what happens if the market rationalizes, if pay per performance advertising becomes a viable way to reach the majority of consumers who consume a particular publication? …If print advertising costs are fundamentally irrational, then it’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the U.S. can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.”

What do you think of Zuckerman’s line of reasoning? If he’s right, what — if anything — can ad-supported news organizations do to update their strategy and work with advertisers on a more rational basis? And if it’s too late for most legacy news organizations to make this shift, could their prospective successors find a more rational, fair way to make money from ads? Please comment below.

(Note: I originally posted this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

The popular service Feedburner, which manages and augments feeds (I use it for this blog), offers a wide range of measuring services to tell you how well you’re connecting with people via your feed.

One of its metrics, “Reach,” which is supposed to indicate active engagement by subscribers, was puzzling me. Today Feedburner tells me I have 2333 subscribers to the Feedburner version of the Contentious.com feed (including people who get my e-mail alerts via Feedblitz, which is generated from my Feedburner feed). However, my “reach” is only 206. What exactly does that mean?

I delved into it further. Bottom line: I have reason to suspect that, depending on your subscribers’ habits, Feedburner’s reach metric may be underestimating your level of audience engagement — perhaps drastically. Here’s why…

In this article (about TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs that uses Feedburner), a Feedburner staffer explained:

“While the subscriber number is a measure of how many people have opted in to receive a feed, “Reach” is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in a feed. At any given time, a certain percentage of the TechCrunch subscriber base is actively engaging with content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight for a given day. Again, to use the example of a newspaper subscription, FeedBurner’s “Reach” calculation is akin to the number of people who have opened the newspaper and actually glanced at the Sudoko puzzle, as opposed to the guy who lets his paper sit out in the rain and get soggy while he’s spending the weekend in Medicine Hat. He’s still considered a subscriber, but just can’t get to his feeds right now.”

I was relieved to learn that my reach-to-subscriber ratio wasn’t abnormally low. That article continues:

“It is not uncommon to see very popular and active feeds with a small percentage reach engagement on any given day, even in a feed where 100% of the total subscriber base is active, simply because most subscribers don’t check all of their feeds every day.”

OK, so that makes sense — I know that my feed reader polls all my feeds a few times daily, but on most days I’m just scanning headlines and only clicking to read (in the browser built into my feed reader Newsfire) a few selected headlines.

Still, I wondered how Feedburner could tell how many people viewed the content in my feed. I can understand counting clicks, but “viewing” can mean a lot of things when you’re talking about a feed.

First of all, a lot of people subscribe to feeds (especially full-text feeds, like mine) for purposes of offline reading. This is especially true for people who prefer to peruse feeds on mobile devices — they’re usually paying for minutes, so it’s costly for them to stay connected any longer than they need to. In fact, one of the main reasons I decided to switch to a full-text feed is because several Contentious readers told me they preferred offline reading and thus found my partial-content feed (which required you to click through to read the rest of a post) frustrating.

Secondly, people who subscribe to e-mail alerts often tend to read e-mail (including alerts) when they aren’t connected to the net. Those offline readers wouldn’t show up in Feedburner’s reach metric.

Finally, many people (especially those on dialup connections, and yes there still are a lot of dialup users out there) opt not to automatically download images on web pages or feeds, to speed overall access to content. Apparently, this can interfere with Feedburner’s tracking method.

How do I know that? I posted to the Feedburner support forum this morning to ask for clarification. Rick Klau responded:

“Amy, you’re right, we can only measure ‘reads’ when a user is online, and using an application which renders HTML. If they’re not rendering images, or are not online at the time, we’re not going to capture the item view.”

So consider your audience. Are many of them likely to engage in offline reading, or not download images? If so, then Feedburner’s reach metric is almost certainly underestimating engagement through your feed.

Also, remember that a lot of site traffic comes from sources other than your feed — such as inbound links, search engines, word of mouth or discussion list referrals, and more. So if you want to understand more about your audience, it’s important to use web analytics (I use Google Analytics, which is good enough for my purposes) along with feed statistics.

…But engagement isn’t all about numbers. In fact, it’s mostly about quality, not quantity. I’ll discuss that in further posts.

Thanks to Rick Klau for clarifying this issue.