Whatever the actual number, Facebook still leaves the second place website, Google, in the dust.
The measuring of internet traffic is an extremely imprecise art, and each tracker uses its own combination of metrics. DoubleClick’s AdPlanner incorporates directly measured traffic from sites that use Google Analytics (Facebook presumably doesn’t). Google says it also factors in other third-party market research.
ComScore, on the other hand, measures total page views from a network of 2 million users worldwide who allow the company to anonymously record their web traffic, and data collected from over 1 million domains.
Analysts generally agree that comScore’s methodology is more trusted. The 12-year-old company makes money from selling its service to clients, so it has an interest in paying rigorous attention to the accuracy of its methodology.
By contrast, AdPlanner is a free tool for advertisers who use DoubleClick. AdPlanner may help advertisers decide where to put their ad dollars, but it is not meant as a replacement for other measurement services.
Google, In June, became the first website to hit 1 billion unique visitors per month, according to comScore. That measurement counts the number of people who visit each site in a given month, excluding return visits.
