Online calculations don't tell full story

National and Labour's online calculators have been a winner with voters this election, right?

Well, maybe not. Although National says it has had three million hits on its tax calculator and Labour's two calculators have had hundreds of thousands of hits, it would seem the online calculators are not as popular as the parties would have us believe.

People familiar with IT terminology will know that the number of "hits" does not equate to the number of unique visitors a website has - in fact it's not even close.

A hit is essentially a request from a web-user to a website for a file, but as web pages are made-up of multiple files viewing of one page can result in many hits. This means one person visiting an online calculator will equate to multiple hits.

Mark Ottaway, managing director for Nielsen/NetRatings, says the term "hit" is overused and usually incorrectly used.

A better measure, he says, is "page impressions", which show how many pages are being read on the site.

An even better measure is "unique browsers" which shows how many individual visitors there have been to a website. The Herald asked Labour and National how many unique browsers had visited their calculators.

National said all it could provide for the time being was the number of hits - which was three million.

Labour said its families calculator had had 30,000 unique views this month and its student loan calculator 7000. Labour was also happy to provide estimates of how many actual people it believes visited the National calculator - a maximum of 70,000 per million hits, but it believes it is probably closer to 30,000.

The two parties have been keen to push the impression that their calculators are popular because it reflects on the policies the calculators relate to.

But even if fewer people visited the calculators than it initially appeared, the calculators have still been an important election tool for the parties, this election by allowing voters to immediately see how the policies will affect their wallets.

The calculator trend started a month ago, when Labour unveiled its student loan calculator.

Sensing it was on to a good thing, Labour continued with the calculator theme and also created a family tax relief calculator. Last week, National finally produced an online calculator and made-up for lost time by making it a multifaceted calculator that compared National and Labour positions on tax and student loans.