We live in the age of data. It is as much as one can do to stop being submerged by the stuff, especially when someone is after our money. But for the shooting enthusiast some sources are more reliable than others. Or are they?
ShootingUK is the website for IPC Media’s shooting magazines, which include the highly respected weekly publication Shooting Times and its sister title Sporting Gun. Recently the website has been advertising its small ads section. The advertisement copy claims the website enjoys over “250,000 visitors and over 1 million page views”. It goes on to say that “you (the advertiser) know your ad will reach the right audience”. But hold on a minute something isn’t quite right with the numbers.
Visitors to Shooting UK’s website will go there for all sorts of reasons, many of them just to read the editorial content, maybe enter a competition or join in a forum and presumably having done what they wish will move on elsewhere without looking at the ad pages. So only a proportion of those 250,000 visitors (perhaps even very few) will bother looking at the ads. We were sure that no one at the website or the magazine would wish readers to spend their money unwisely, so we wrote to the publisher pointing out the error. Alas he has not replied and now we don’t know what to think.