Blog Tipz

Programs that track the number of visitors your site receives, whether on a daily or monthly basis, can be helpful in determining the trends of your site.  From the information that these give, you can adjust the type of content that you produce, how you market your blog, and sell advertisements.

The dependence on these services, primarily by larger advertisers can sometimes lead them to suspect that some sties get either more or less traffic, depending solely on what these sites report.  After all, most sites don’t have a dedicated Advertise page with specific details from the tracking codes that have been installed on their site or the server-side tracking programs.

Recently, there have been more people asking about the relevancy of Alexa and other sites, which allow anyone to access a general trends chart of your site traffic, page views, and other “snapshot” details.  There are many specific details you need to know about how each site obtains its information, reflective of what is displayed in the charts.

Note: Daily Blog Tips recently published a report comparing Alexa traffic vs. Google Trends and Compete stats, which is worth checking out.  Daniel’s was a case-by-case study of how Alexa stats are misrepresentative of the true figures, while this report is primarily based on traffic levels of my site versus others.

Alexa – “The Web Information Company”

An Amazon subsidiary, Alexa bases its traffic on people’s habits who use the Alexa toolbar.  Information is then placed in the traffic rankings system.  Trend graphs display a three-day moving average of the site’s daily traffic rank, charted over time.  Several popular anti-spyware programs currently classify the add-on as a tracking program, warning users to uninstall it.  

Disclaimer: Traffic is based on toolbars, “which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population.”  Sites with lower traffic are not weighed the same as higher sites, rankings over 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable.  

Main Problem: Algorithm recently changed, not tracking social bookmarking/networking traffic as accurately.  Generally estimates reach, rank, and page views on percent of the entire database of sites Alexa tracks.  If more people use the toolbar and visit particular sites, the traffic levels of that site may, in essence, be higher for that site.

Quantcast – “The World’s Only Open Internet Ratings Service”

Traffic levels at Quantcast are supposedly based on extensive research and development by the team of engineers and mathematicians to help provide publishers with a free and easy way to report on the traffic audience, for metrics and stats that advertisers demand, including demographics, traffic, and lifestyle assessments.

Disclaimer: Determines traffic from ten million internet properties (as of June 2008), seventy-five billion directly measured events, and 204 million US people online.

Main Problem: Requires code to be added to site, otherwise inaccurate stats will be reported or none at all, depending on the size of the blog.

Compete – “A New Breed of Web Analytics Company”

Compete judges traffic from two million plus United States Internet users that have given them permission to analyze the web pages that they visit and ask them questions via surveys.

Disclaimer: Provides a more accurate look at larger sites, as determined by their “About” statement, mainly factoring in larger sites. Favors United States traffic.

Main Problem: Traffic is determined based off of people’s opinion, stating that marketers can use this information across the entire company, not just for online media planning or site design decisions.  Extremely rough estimates, sites may not register low traffic levels.

Google Trends – “Compare the World’s Interests in Your Favorite Topics”

Google Trends (sites) analyzes web traffic based on searches and Google Analytics information, should you decide to share it with other Google Services.  It also bases it on the number of times your topic/site appeared in Google News stories.  

Disclaimer: Still in beta/labs, so it’s still in early stages of development, potentially containing inaccuracies for a number of reasons.  Only available in English and Chinese.

Main Problem: Like the other services, results are normalized, so large spikes do not register as accurately as daily/normal traffic levels.  Sites require a minimum of one thousand daily page views to register, sometimes higher, therefore it can’t provide an accurate analysis of the web’s sites.  Plus, it only registers traffic in Google, leaving out approximately thirty to forty percent of the results.

Site Meter – “Counter and Statistics Tracker”

Site Meter is a free and paid service that I will be using in this report to analyze the traffic trends.  It requires a tracking code to be installed on your site.  Individual company.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most used services for tracking site information, from everything from user paths to browser information.  Requires a tracking code to be installed on your site.  Owned and operated by the largest search engine.

Report

In order to produce accurate results, I compared all of the above tools and services and produced similar charts, all for this site and comparisons of other sites in similar topics and ranking (higher also included).  The main goal: to find the most analytics and tracking service, whether available to the general public or requiring a tracking code to be installed.

First, we’ll take a look at each service individually, then take sample charts from each service comparing multiple sites.

Google Analytics - The following charts are taken from my Google Analytics reports page, with the first showing Site Usage, or a detailed report of visits, pages/visit, average time on site, % new visits, and bounce rates for the June 1-June 30, 2008 and July 1-July 31, 2008 period, stacked.  This chart is to give a good idea of United States versus international traffic levels and growth for the two month period.  The average time on site and other details are not necessarily factors to keep the report simple.

This second image is page views and visits, stacked for the entire period that this site has been active, mid-October to the current date.  Used to represent traffic trend of site over the time period.

Site Meter - Again, these charts are simply paced for trend information, giving “specific” details of monthly traffic levels, and the overall trend through the bar graph.  Traffic for the October to August period.

Quantcast - Analytics information from select periods (tracking code removed).  It is a rough representation of daily traffic levels, but needs to be included for this comparison, as it is considered one of the top three to four publicly available trends sites. Different views included.

Compete - Traffic information since the site launched.  According to Compete, my rank has gone down (negative) more than 250,00 ranks, indicating a 55.3% decrease in traffic.  Compete also states that their traffic levels have now surpassed that of Alexa’s.

Alexa - Traffic information from the February to August 4 (latest) period.  The “reach” is based on world traffic levels.  According to the chart, I have climbed 50% in reach and 69,991 in rank over the past three months, although the general trend is fairly stagnant, not increasing over time.  Graph is completely smoothed.  

All Services (Their Traffic) - Added as a representative amount of the popularity of each service – Site Meter, Quantcast, Alexa, Compete, and ComScore (another service).  Google Trends and Google Analytics (15,000 US visitors per month) can not be estimated correctly.  Interestingly enough, Compete marks ComScore with a “Warning” label, indicating that it has been flagged as a spammer/scammer, spoof site, or malware distributor.

All Services (Blog Tipz Traffic) – To best represent trends (Alexa and Quantcast implemented based on available data).  In this chart, I compare all the services listed above, for easier comparison.  Alexa and Quantcast’s information are also not on the same scale or basis, traffic percentage, for Alexa’s.

Snapshot: Compete’s traffic levels are most inaccurate the the past two months, while Google Analytics and SiteMeter’s are the most accurate, followed by Quantcast’s (likely), then Alexa’s, based on the growth pattern.

Other Comparisons

In these examples, I have compared my site to other, fairly popular sites, to see how each site stacks up.  One of the site is fairly randomly selected, simply added for illustration purposes.

Links: Compete | Quantcast | Google Trends | Alexa

Google Trends - Two sites not available for ranking.  Indicates trends, but not much more.  It can’t display traffic for websites with less than 1,000 daily page views/visitors, so sites with high ranking have more data available.

Alexa - Nearly all the sites show similar traffic levels, other than John Chow and Pro Blogger’s website, which have shown large downturns, and now upturns in traffic.  Inaccurate results when comparing all results.

 

Compete - Not enough information for two sites.  Fairly accurate results when comparing multiple sites, not accurate on some (my) site.

Quantcast – Two versions, “Literal” and Relative comparisons, respectively.  You can see when sites add or remove the code through the charts.  Provides good metrics of growth on a daily basis and comparison, especially in the “Literal” comparison.  However, it is similar to Alexa and Compete’s caveats as it requires the tracking code to be added and appears to favor United States traffic more than global traffic.

Conclusion

While my traffic levels are quite low compared to some of the sites compared, it shouldn’t make a huge difference, as my site is ranked “within the top 100,000″ in Alexa and several other services.

In the report of comparing trends and monthly visitors, Site Meter and Google Analytics scored the highest in being able to produce similar reports.  For the past two months, Alex and even more so, Compete, failed to provide accurate traffic/trends in line with the code that was placed on my site.  

It is quite staggering when you take a look at the difference in the number of visitors.  There are dozens of sites that will provide free tools to track your site popularity, and most of them, many run by multi-billion dollar companies (Amazon) can’t even provide decent site trend information.

My advice: Do your own analytics and tracking by installing a tracking code, with the best choice being Google Analytics, followed by nearly any other service.  Advertisers need to stay away from Alexa and in some cases, Compete and request information from the selected site/network of sites.  Google Analytics allows you to share varying levels of reports directly from your Dashboard to potential advertisers.  In this way, you can potentially gain advertisers as they don’t have to research and be mislead by the services that other large, site analytics corporations can’t touch.

Traffic Ranks:

Alexa - 168,365 (World)
Compete – 465,254 (US)
Quantcast - 1,712,503 (Not an accurate representation)

What can you do with Alexa?  Look at how your small site is more popular than large, authority blogs.  Compete?  It indicates that your visitor levels are rapidly declining and need to refine your promotion methods.  They aren’t even useful for “trend” information.  Major work on their code and algorithms needs to be done.