News stories about Facebook reaching a staggering one trillion page views are completely erroneous.
At all started when online advertising group Doubleclick AdPlanner showed in its latest report that the social networking site climbed up to one trillion page views during June.
The story got picked up by blogs and sites around the Web. Many of the major news sites, however, including TG Daily, did not report on the seemingly amazing milestone. The more widely accepted source in calculating page view measurements is Comscore, which has widely different numbers.
For example, in its latest monthly report, Comscore showed a tally of 467 billion page views for Facebook.
Comscore explained the discrepancy by saying Doubleclick relies on users’ cookie information, which is not all that accurate because many users reset their cookies during the month.
“Cookie-based methodologies will always have inflated numbers compared to panel-based, because people delete their cookies throughout the month. For a site with high engagement like Facebook, this is going to result in overstatement of figures,” said Comscore spokesperson Stephanie Flosi in a CNN story.
Doubeclick, which is owned by Facebook rival Google, explains on its page that all Internet tracking numbers are used to “get an idea of” page view activity. So it admits that its data may not actually be representative of actual user activity.
