Nielsen/NetRatings is expected to announce today a new method of counting visitors to websites that takes into account users' deletion of cookies, reports MediaPost. Nielsen is now combining cookie-deletion info from Nielsen's consumer research panel with visitor numbers collected by its SiteCensus analytics tool, which relies on cookies. The new audience measurement method is being tested in the U.S. and is already in use in Italy and Australia. Nielsen says it can compute cookie deletion rates, and then apply that info to a site's visitor numbers to generate a more accurate estimate of visitors.

Nielsen determines whether it has placed a site's cookie on the same computer more than once during a month - and then can figure out the proportion of users who have deleted that site's cookies, and how many times they have done so. It then derives a ratio between users and cookies, and applies it to the number of visitors reported by a site.

Nielsen is able to calculate cookie deletion rates only for sites that use its analytics tool, SiteCensus, because Nielsen can recognize those cookies.

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