A day doesn’t go by where I don’t see some shoddy Internet statistics. I received my copy of OMMA magazine today and found this gem of a statistic – an overview of the top “unemployment” related terms and Web sites, courtesy of Hitwise:
While I have no doubt that Ohio has been disproportionately impacted by the economic downturn, it does seem a little bit hard to believe that the most popular unemployment related term in May was “Ohio Unemployment”, followed in second place by a search for the Ohio employment agency.
Since Hitwise collects its data through a sample of Internet users, the likely reason for this Ohio-centric data is that one or more of their sampled users lives in Ohio and did these searches, thus skewing the rest of the data.
One would think that either OMMA or Hitwise would have checked this before publishing this to tens of thousands of marketers, many of whom are as cynical about Internet metrics as I am. Hopefully the copy editor who let this fly is Ohio-based – the data might actually come in handy.
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