Dave Chaplin, CEO, ContractorCalculator, says "Contracting: It’s not all about the money."
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Where are we going? And what’s with this hand basket? -
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Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion.Comment
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That is beyond being a plank, that's being a pillock.Originally posted by voodooflux View PostComment
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I will just pack my suitcase! see you over there for the cuk winter break!Originally posted by voodooflux View PostHmmm, I believe his blog accepts comments...
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Hi everyone
We have covered this on our home page for anyone who wants to know more (http://www.contractoruk.com/004150.html).
We did have a complaint made against us (just the one, out of 250,000 visitors to CUK that month) and by a competitor, Contractor Calculator. We’re told it’s often competitors that raise complaints to the ASA.
Essentially Dave Chaplin had his sited audited by ABCe in the busy Budget month of March 2008 and promoted his site in a newsletter saying “we're the most visited contractor network with over 100,000 monthly visitors!”. We promoted our figures shortly afterwards which obviously didn’t go down too well, as he says on his own site “We were very excited to have verification from ABCe of the 104,584 unique visitors that had come to our site. But our joy was short-lived, because within hours we saw that Contractor UK was claiming to have had 249,146 unique visitors for the same period.”
Budget month is a busy month for all contractor sites; indeed it was our best month by a long way as a result of our budget coverage, analysis for contractors and the very busy forum too. That success didn’t surprise us as much as it did our competitors since we invest a great deal in providing the news, expert analysis on what means for contractors and a place for contractors to discuss how issues like the budget affect them. So yes, that month’s figures were significantly more than those for other months, which is to be expected.
We were also approached by a ‘mystery’ shopper requesting traffic information which was included in CC’s submission to the ASA as it showed just a fraction of our total visitor figure. At that time it was policy for us to give traffic figures just for the areas of the site the enquirer was interested in. So, for instance we would enquire as to the nature of the services that provider was looking to advertise and give the traffic stats for that area of the site only, which we did in this case. Hence that person was not given the full traffic for the site and this is being inaccurately reported elsewhere as us giving two different sets of unique visitor figures for the whole of CUK.
We used Google Analytics for measuring our traffic for two reasons. Firstly they are a trusted authority and two they use cookies, the closest possible means of measuring only human traffic and excludes double counting by uniquely identifying visitors in this way. Google themselves confirmed to us “Google Analytics uses cookie-based tracking which by default excludes visits from spiders and robots since these do not execute Javascript.” ABCe also confirmed to us that cookie-based tracking is the preferred method in terms of accuracy.
We also supplied comprehensive data from GA which further proved correct implementation of GA, with over 99% of traffic clearly deriving from tracking code added to the Contractor UK site only, meaning that the tracking code was not added incorrectly to other sites for instance in order to falsely inflate traffic. The ASA confirmed they duly noted the reports show the unique visitor numbers as being exactly those we advertised. So to clarify, these figures have not been falsely inflated as reported elsewhere, we provide full, comprehensive data to substantiate the figures we advertised, and the ruling is purely that we haven’t audited.
We believe we have provided robust evidence of our visitor figures and that the decision is deeply flawed.
We are aware that this ruling is being covered elsewhere and those reports contain inaccuracies.Comment
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Is there an appeals process, and if so are you planning to pursue it?Originally posted by Contractor UK View PostWhere are we going? And what’s with this hand basket?Comment
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