Classified Ads
Our Classified Ads section will show a column titled "views". This number corresponds to the number up times the ad has actually been clicked on and viewed by a person.

But the views on xyz.com site shows my ad has thirty-trillion views?

Other classified sites use wordplay and even a little trickery to misrepresent the number of times your ad has actually been viewed. Each time your ad is clicked on and viewed, it was accessed from a page which lists all the ads. Therefore, every time your ad is clicked, this listing page has been shown at least once, possibly more if some sorting of the listings was done before an ad was clicked. Sites that employ this technique will count the listing page as a view (because "technically" the title of your ad was displayed somewhere on the page, even if it did not appear on the screen) for EVERY AD LISTED on the page.

This number is actually -at the very minimum- the sum total of :

Every clickthrough to every ad displayed on the page during the lifespan of your ad, since there is at least one listing view for every ad clickthrough.

PLUS the actual number of times your ad has actually been viewed.

PLUS the actual number of times the ad listing page was displayed WITHOUT clicking through to an ad.

Confusing? Yes, we think so too.

Since this is a meaningless statistic, OutdoorsFIRST only reports the number of times each individual ad has actually been viewed.

Site Statistics
Site access log data are only as valid as the experience and knowledge of the person reporting them. Site traffic and metrics are often overrreported due to lack of knowledge or turning a blind eye to the weaknesses of certain types of reporting packages.

For example, many analysis packages acting at the logfile level are usually set to report every non-image file logged at the server as a page view. These sites will end up reporting pageview statistics at least double if not triple or quadruple of what reality might be. This is due to the fact that each page accessed is logging 1) a pageview for the page, and 2) one or two or three additional pageviews for linked stylesheet or .js files which define the style and formatting rules for that page.

Many sites hesitate moving to more accurrate form of analytics, since they will greatly deflate the incorrect numbers they have been reporting to advertisers for years.

OutdoorsFIRST uses third party page-level analytics to ensure accurate and ethical traffic reporting of only viewable pages on all of our sites.

Message Forum Posts
A very common tactic that sites employ to skew the perception of their message board or forum traffic is by seeding their topic and forum counts, or "online user" count, with a flat number, sort of like starting a checkbook at #1000.

Another common trick is to use confusing language, i.e. combining your forum "topics" and "topic replies" numbers and reporting them as just "topics" (instead of total messages). If you are truly the "Real Deal", you shoudn't have to skew these numbers.

Another method of skewing numbers is to lengthen the user session the forum software uses to inflate the perception of the number or people browsing a forum at any given time. Sime sites set this number to an hour, or even two or more hours.

OutdoorsFIRST lists the number of Threads (topics) and Messages (replies) "as is", leaving no room for confusion.

An OutdoorsFIRST "online user" session is set at 30 minutes, which is the industry standard.


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