| Data Collection Technology
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The measurement technology used by the IrelandMetrix system is browser-based. Every page on websites participating in IrelandMetrix has Bluemetrix JavaScript tagging embedded. When a page is loaded on the browser, the JavaScript is activated and a single pixel image is requested by the browser from the Bluemetrix collection servers. The request headers contain various items of standard information (e.g. URL page requested, cookie status, systems statistics, etc.) which are sent to the collection servers. This information is then processed to report and measure viewing usage across the various sites participating in IrelandMetrix.
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| Caching |
At present, there are 3 types of popular caching methods used widely on the Internet; ISP Caching, Proxy Caching and Browser Caching. In all of these cases it is possible for the requested page to be served from Cache and not from the actual server that is hosting the page. As IrelandMetrix only measures pages when they are fully loaded on the browser, it collects 100% of all pages viewed regardless of where or how they are served.
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| BOTS & Crawlers |
Within IrelandMetrix all non-human activity is discounted. This is achieved using the following methodologies:
- Most bots do not load images, therefore when a bot crawls a webpage it does not load the IrelandMetrix image request, and is not counted.
- For the small percentage of bots that do load the image, IrelandMetrix checks that the loaded image has a full collection of system statistics i.e. OS, Screen Size, etc. If these are not present, the activity is not counted.
- In the rare situation, where a bot does load images and spoof system statistics, IrelandMetrix checks the browser agent string as well as the IP address of the request to determine if it is human (PC) or non-human (bot) activity.
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| Site Measurement |
For each site that is being measured on the IrelandMetrix network, a file is kept on a daily basis listing all cookies that visited that site on a given day. When these files are counted on a weekly or monthly basis it is possible to get the number of weekly or monthly unique visitors that visited that site.
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| Site Duplication |
In order to calculate the visitor traffic between sites for a given time period, IrelandMetrix will select the relevant set of unique visitor cookie data for each site, and then carry out a comparison between the sets of data where the common cookies are used to determine the duplication figure between these sites.
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| Site Reach |
The total data for all sites measured on the IrelandMetrix system is referred to as “the Irish Internet Universe”. As the IrelandMetrix database contains cookies for all sites measured on the network, the system is therefore able to calculate each site’s individual reach within the Irish Internet Universe, for any given period of time. |
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