Stat comparison to other sites?

Heard good/bad about Alexa

[barneyl]

Hi there - I'm no code-munching Webmaster, I'm a content guy, who comes from the land of newspapers and broadcast, where there are reliable, established ways of measuring one's audience against one's competitors.

There's no such thing, really, in the Web universe yet, now is there?

Nielsen is moving that way, I figure, but there's no Audit Bureau of Circulation (which can be gamed, as we've seen) - and just want to make sure I'm not missing an obvious place to turn for such things (and yes, I figure whoever IS offering it a) charges up the wazoo and b) includes caveats because it's not always an apples-to-apples comparison.

I just hope someone reputable deals with this sooner than later. Google Analytics is all well and good, as it focusing on making one's own site better, but we live in a competitive world, and it's crucial to have some valid comparison metric - right?
Barney Lerten-Bend, Oregon

[gregbo]

A general rule of online analytics is to first identify what you want to measure. Alexa measures activity conducted through its toolbar. This is not necessarily "unique users", "sessions", "visits" or anything like that (and is highly susceptible to fraud). OTOH, it can be used (roughly) to identify trends. So you need to decide whether it is good enough for you. As you mentioned cost as a factor, is the (questionable) extra accuracy of Nielsen worth the extra money?

[cgrantski]

That's so true.

Is it crucial to have comparison stats? Good question. What exactly would you do differently if you had good comparison stats?

[vite_rts]

one would have a better idea about whose example to follow, you know , follow the money :)

[stapel]

I think Alexa can be somewhat useful for comparing general trends within a given field.

For instance, if Site A and Site B serve the same audience (at least roughly), and Site A has an Alexa ranking of, say, 85,000, while Site B has an Alexa ranking of 32,000, then it would probably be safe to say that Site B is "bigger" than Site A.

However, if Sites A and B are both roundsabout, say, 50,000 in the rankings, it would probably not be safe to say that Site B is "bigger" on the basis of a ranking of 49,000 versus 51,000. It's too close to call.

Also, if one or the other of the sites is below the 100,000-ranking level, you probably can say very little, if anything, about their relative sizes. It is my understanding that numbers past the half-million mark are generally regarded as almost entirely useless.

On the other hand, if Site A and Site B are unrelated (and therefore may have entirely different Alexa-toolbar surfing patterns), then you might not be able to say anything about their comparative sizes.

Regarding trending: If, over the long haul (months or years; not days), the Alexa stats show a trend in one direction or another, then it may be possible to make conclusions about the growth or decline of a site.

But since the Alexa ratings are, to some extent at least, a relative measure, this may need to be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, Site A might be getting the exact same amount of traffic as it did two years ago, but the volume of sites has trebled since then, and, relative to the new volume of sites, the traffic for Site A just doesn't rank that high any more. Nothing will have gone "wrong" at Site A, but it's part of a bigger pool, and may suffer by comparison.

Just my opinions, of course....

Eliz.

[arieng]

I've been currently wrestling with this same problem. My industry has 2 main competitors. Alexa has historically shown that we get as much traffic as one of the competitors while the other gets twice what we get. Since we are quite smaller than either of the other two, we felt we were doing pretty good in generating traffic.

However, while recently looking into a completely unrelated technology I came across one of the country's leading competitive analysis firms (they have lots of Fortune500 clients).

They claimed that Alexa's toolbar is particularly popular with techies and in international markets. Because the ranking data is generated by the toolbar, Alexa's data is seriously skewed. This company claimed to generate data from US-based ISPs, which should be much more reliable.

The result: of all the traffic for the 3 companies combined, we were receiving about 10% while our competitors were getting about 30% and 60%.

If this is true, the ramifications on market size and profit potential is enormous. It also significantly reduces our own grade on the traffic generation report card.

You were right re: the cost. A 1-year contract is in the middle 5-figure range and up. Serious dough.

If anyone has any more information on how reliable this data is compared to Alexa's, I'd love to hear it.

[gregbo]

By US-based ISPs, they probably mean AOL, Earthlink, MSN, etc., ie. not the mom-n-pops that are popular with techies, early adopters, etc.

[sniffer]

Also, I think the Alexa toolbar would be skewed fairly heavily to US visitors, so its not really a true global comparison