Other online audience data sources
UKOM aims to standardise web audience measurement with other media, for the benefit of brand advertising across digital and offline platforms. However, the technical possibilities of online mean there are other approaches used to measure site audiences. These have their own pros and cons...
ABCe/JICWEBS
Log files from websites are cleaned and approved by ABCe as a definitive audit of the number of browsers accessing a site in a given period. The main limitation is that browsers do not equal people: research in Australia suggests that cookie deletion means that browsers outnumber users on average by 2.7 to 1.
Survey data
Several other media use recall-based surveys to measure audiences. The main limitations of recall-based measures of website usage are that people cannot effectively recall the sites they visit, and tend to report idealised usage. However this type of data can be useful for profiling site users.
Site analytics
Analytics software gathers detailed data on site usage, and is very useful for media owners looking to optimise their site experience and marketing. However, analytics software only measures within the site and its associated marketing (so isn't a cross-platform tool), and can also include non-human traffic (esp. web robots)