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Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim wrote a January 5th piece on using scripts to create large numbers of PageFlake (a free RSS reader website) accounts to subscribe to a Feedburner RSS feed.

“It seems that somebody has created a bot [automated script] that would create many profiles on Pageflakes (which is a web-based RSS reader) and then subscribe to BoingBoing in each of these profiles multiple times. The net effect was that BoingBoing reported over 2 million subscribers from Pageflakes, a very very dramatic increase over the numbers that were being reported only days earlier.” Says Nik Cubrolovic.

Obviously, the originators of this process got caught and Feedburner has since rectified the issue, but the point it raises is a good one.

When you are looking to advertise on a blog, or any website for that matter, do you simply look at one metric? Alexa Data, Feedburner Subscribers, Page Views, Unique Visitors? If so you could potentially be throwing valuable marketing dollars down the drain. This is because all these datapoints can be exploited to deceive you and raise their potential income value.

How would someone go about manipulating this data?

We’ll start with the datapoint most prone to manipulation: Alexa. Take a number of computers—your mom’s, brother’s, your best friend’s, your own – and install the Alexa toolbar on each respective computer’s copy of Internet Explorer. Then create a script that refreshes and clicks on each page of your site at least 10-15 minutes a day. (Include the result, something like “voila – your unique visits have leapt by x amount” or something like that.)

Feedburner creates an RSS feed which can be read by RSS subscribers— Feedburner gives you detailed information on the number of people reading the particular data feed. You could easily create a script that creates accounts on Google RSS Feeder, PageFlakes, and many other programs to bolster the number of “unique readers” your site has. To make the process effective you would then need to have those accounts at PageFlakes opened once a week and “view” the content (again, one could easily write a script to handle this)

Page Views is also relatively easy to script for cheating. Simply create a program that reloads pages all over your site. Set this up on a number of different computers and watch your page views soar!

Unique Visitors is one the most difficult common metrics to cheat on, but it too can easily be done by an unscrupulous webmaster with basic hacking skills and knowledge of certain Windows XP flaw (or access to a Trojan horse). By utilizing a group of “zombie computers” (computers that have been hijacked for malicious purposes) to all hit your websites—this could be hundreds or thousands of computers, depending on the resources you have at hand – and dramatically increase the number of overall unique visitors a site appears to have.

When publicly available metrics are so easy to cheat, what can you do to protect the integrity of your marketing dollars? To start with, bear in mind no data set is perfect, but the closer you get to perfect, the stronger an outlook you will have on your website’s actual impact on a given audience. Never make the mistake of imagining the data from one site is more accurate or illustrative than the data from another. Use different sources and all available data to get a complete picture of where best to spend your ad dollars.

Don’t be afraid to ask for a few months’ worth of metric data, actually demand at least 6 months of data. After all, this is your business. If you have a web 2.0 or interactive site, check for signs of life. How many comments does typical entry on the blog get? How many users are signed up and active on the forum? Of course these metrics can be spoofed as well, but when you take multiple variables into account, you should have a good strong picture of your advertising context.