Forum Moderators: buckworks
I've just tried statbrain on one of my sites and it is miles over the actual traffic levels as measured by Google Analytics + AWStats. Why are you relying on statbrain for your own site? You need something a lot more accurate... like Google Analytics for instance ;)
I agree with Jack, you need Google Analytics so you can dive deeper into your site's issues. I'd be worried less about "visitors" and more about conversions. What percent of your visitors actually complete a purchase?
there are many reasons for which your competitor may have more users:
- they may rank for lots of less popular keywords - you may rank #1 for "widgets" but they will rank high for all those "cheap widgets with option X in city Y".
- they may be getting traffic from high quality backlinks from websites that drive them traffic.
- they may be running advertising campaign that drive traffic to their site.
- they may be running an affiliate programme.
- they may have some feature of their site that their users keep coming back so they add up to the new ones, e.g. great forum, superb expert blog.
- finally, they may be a brand.
Search engines repeatedly report that users keep searching for longer and longer keywords every month or quarter.
50% of searches in Google happen only once in the history - how many 1-word, 2-word, 3-word combinations are there?
The best way to grow your traffic is either spend your dollars and time on huge advertising so you become a brand one day (hopefully) or spend your time and dollars on high quality content and decent backlinks so your website grows and ranks for loads of these long-tail keywords.
Statbrain estimates the number of visits that a website has based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any counter information.
You could as well ask a fortune teller about the number of your visitors. Take a look at your actual logs to find out how many visitors you really have.
Statbrain may show 3000 visitors for your competitor. Perhaps they only have 300 in reality. Statbrain shows 150 visitors for you. Maybe you have 1500. You will never know. Until you really count the visitors and not ask some guessing machine on the internet.
If it was right, my conversion rate would be over 60%.
It appears to be a less-than-valuable tool for estimating true traffic.
Once my site is redesigned I will have the analytics in place that I currently don't have.
I'd opt to install analytics right away so that when you do the site redesign you can quantify the effects your design improvements make. You'll be able to answer things like did the new design increase pages per visit, time spent on the site and did the bounce rates go down, etc.
