Let me start off by saying that I am a fan of Google. It is my search engine of choice, I like Gmail and we are looking into other services that they provide to implement in my business. That said, they might have cost NY Report some money. We use Google Analytics to measure traffic to nyreport.com. While we don't generate a high percent of our revenue from online advertising, it is an increasing share of our revenue base (and we sold out of March inventory). Analytics helps us determine how much traffic we have available to sell (in the form of banner ads).
Recently we noticed that some other metrics like clicks from email newsletters and impression data from our ad server were showing higher traffic than Analytics. But what really surprised me is that Google AdSense was showing us higher traffic, as well. So I emailed our web developer to ask him what he thought. He dug up a few articles that lead me to believe that we are not alone. So we installed another free traffic tool called Piwik and then another called Woopra (courtesy of Jonathan Fields) to see what numbers they come up with.
I will report back to you on what we find in a week or so. In the meantime, if you have been told that you can't advertise on nyreport.com because we were "sold out," you might be in luck.
PS - The NYC Department of Small Business Services is calling for nominations of individuals, small businesses and community organizations for the 2010 NYC Neighborhood Achievement Awards, to be hosted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Commissioner Robert W. Walsh at Gracie Mansion this summer. Applications are due on Monday, March 15. To learn more and nominate a candidate, please visit www.nyc.gov/sbsawards.
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