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Visits per Month
Unique Users per Month
Page Views per Month
Total # of Pages
Pages Indexed by Google
Google PR
# of Backlinks
Alexa Rank
It would be interesting to see if anything solid can be gleaned from this sort of information. Maybe a general topic of the site should be included as well. Maybe using the second level of the Yahoo Directory (ie "Health: Mental Health" for my own site).
Sean
Site 1
Visits: 115000
Unique Users: 94000
Page Views: 375000
Total # of Pages: roughly 2500
Pages Indexed by Google: 1440
Google PR: 7
# of Backlinks: 2470
Alexa Rank: 46058
Yahoo Category: Health: Mental Health
Site 2
Visits: 7500
Unique Users: 5000
Page Views: 25000
Total # of Pages: roughly 400
Pages Indexed by Google: 238
Google PR: 6
# of Backlinks: 1610
Alexa Rank: 95456
Yahoo Category: Health: Mental Health
Gee.. this looks familiar :-).
<Visits per Month
Unique Users per Month
Page Views per Month>
I'd like to participate, but I don't understand what these are asking. They look like they are overlapping. Can you please define?
Most stats programs give both a total visits or sessions (Visits per Month) and a count of unique users (Unique Users per Month).
I have problems with stats......
IMHO
Visits per Month - Impossible figure to calculate unless you can guarantee no proxy server caching or browser caching. Many dynamic pages can be cached.
Unique Users per Month - Impossible to know because of above + some isp's such as aol will have a user appearing as a different ip address for each page they visit.
Page Views per Month - Impossible to know for both above reasons. Low number of pageviews can be a sign of a well designed site?!
Total # of Pages and Pages Indexed by Google - yes, important.
Google PR - IMHO pr is becoming less important. Too many other factors now effect the serps. If you have pr4+ you're in the game. High pr is great, but on site factors can go a long way to compensate. The pr of a site may not be a plus or minus factor in you getting the right visitors for your site.
# of Backlinks - type, quality etc. outweighs pure numbers. 20 high quality pr5 links counts for a lot.
Alexa Rank - Good comparative data for sites in same sector and country but loads of potential anomolies e.g. shared servers, sites used by people likely to have the alexa toolbar, and, I think, site construction/design will effect the number of pageviews (which I think is also a factor?). If a site is well indexed then visitors will be directed to the relevant page from google, thus few pageviews but high user satisfaction.
Most stats software is hopelessly inaccurate. It is a valuable snap shot which can show major problems, but can also indicate completely wrong conclusions e.g.
A site has a cachable home page with dynamic (no cachable) internal pages. Stats show 100 visitors to home page, with 500 internal page views.... great....but in reality the home page had a further 1000 home page visitors who picked up the isp cache, looked at it and left....the stats software has no way of knowing this. Therefore the site may not be as good as the stats suggest. The internal page views are accurate, the homepage views are miles out.
Anyway, they are useful for looking for trends, e.g. site x received x number of visitors in January compared with x number of visitors in February.
<Page views are page views.
Most stats programs give both a total visits or sessions (Visits per Month) and a count of unique users (Unique Users per Month).>
Maybe I should be a bit more specific. It sounds that either "Page Views" and "Visits Per Month" are the same thing, or "Visits Per Month" and "Unique Visits Per Month" are the same thing. I'm only seeing two distinct different things, but they're being listed as three.
Visits: Total number of visits (this will probably be greater than uniques because some visit more than once.
Unique Visitors: Number of people who visited one or more times. Each visitor only gets counted once, no matter how many times they visit.
In the end, it's all pretty much guess work, but it's a place to start.
Comparing my stats to someone elses is pretty meaningless unless we are using raw data derived using exactly the same factors and processed using exactly the same methods.
If stats have any credible meaning, it is to as a measure of our own sites against their historic record. Even then, if you change any of the criteria involved, you need to be able to apply the new changes to the historic data to be able to make a fair comparison to current and future data.
<Page views: Total number of pages viewed by all visitors combined.
Visits: Total number of visits (this will probably be greater than uniques because some visit more than once.
Unique Visitors: Number of people who visited one or more times. Each visitor only gets counted once, no matter how many times they visit.>
Right, but you can't reliably know if someone visits more than once in a month because it's unlikely that they will have the same IP address throughout the month.
Yup, that's why it's probably a best guess gueswork game at best.
you can't reliably know if someone visits more than once in a month because it's unlikely that they will have the same IP address throughout the month.
I agree that we can't know reliably what the actual numbers are. But we can get a sense of the sites overall size and effectiveness with the general numbers. I'd like to do is see if there is any real correlation between any of this information and if it can be used to determine a site (or topic) potential.
Lets say you have three websites (or topics):
All three sites have 100 pages. Site One has 100 visitors each hitting 100 pages, Site Two has 1000 visitors each hitting 10 pages, Site Three has 10000 visitors each hitting 1 page are all three worth the same?
Common sense would say yes. Marketing sense would say no.
For this argument, the total number of visits is "popularity", and number of pages per visit is "effectiveness".
It seems to me that Google (PR) likes sites based more on popularity since that is basically what determines backlinks. So I believe Google would like Site Three.
Alexa seems to like sites based on a combination of popularity (reach) and effectiveness (page views). I believe Alexa would like Site Two because of the balance.
Marketing sense says that Site One is the strongest since it obviously has a solid brand behind it. The traffic is small, which means they are most likely very targeted.
I believe all these factors combine to make up a sites overall value.
The biggest problem is that the perceived value (according to companies offering appraisals) varies so much that they can be forgotten altogether. However, I happen to like this model if one needs to be considered at all:
[buysellwebsite.com...]
I choose to ignore the "content value" because it seems a bit arbitrary. My site is well designed, has a crappy domain name (too long and hyphenated), is unique in many ways, but has no proprietary software - it is the content and the organization that make the site valuable to our users.
The problem is, which "applicable keyword" do you select. For my own site, I have a number of choices and the range is pretty big. The most applicable term seems the best bet, but it diminishes the value of the site. Most of our traffic comes from fairly targeted keywords that carry a wide range of values.
Since my site is not geared towards selling anything, I know the value is lower than sites of similar size. And that should also be a factor in determining both value and potential. A bigger factor should be the growth rate of the site, since this has a direct impact on ad revenue and sales (if the site is oriented that way).
Is this all pointless... probably, but I'm a bit of a statistics nut about everything.
Sean
I was interested in the thought of linking visits to Alexa Ranking. However when I looked at comparative sites to your two, a site of mine with PT6, visits per month of 25,000 has an Alexa Ranking of just over 500,000!
I then looked at sites of mine with larger traffic and could find nothing like an Alexa ranking of 46,000. All were languishing in 6 figure numbers.
Having seen the various forum discussions on WebmasterWorld on Alexa ranking, I have rightly or wrongly, reached the conclusion that it does not tell you much, and is probably influenced by you accessing you own site more than anything else.
Cornwall - 25000 per month would give you a ranking of about 500000, I would say that was accurate. We have a site in keeping with seanetal's example 1 with around 5000 uniques per day.
Alexa is pretty good, and when it goes wrong it is fairly easy to spot it.
seanetal - Your site 2 example has a distorted alexa ranking because of the server it is on. There must be other sites on the same server contributing to produce that figure...this sometimes happens with their rankings.
Actually the distortion is from a combination of Alexa's "3 month average" practice and an Alexa active audience on the site. When I launched the site about 4 months ago I had a brief period where the numbers were great. The larger site was feeding traffic to site 2 and the users were clicking around to each page.
As a result, I had about a week and a half of 55,000 rankings which are still affecting my 3 month average. I do know the stats program I am using is understating traffic some. Testing shows I can hit 20 pages and it will record anything from about 8 to 15 depending on which pages I hit.
The fact that one or two of my more frequent visitors are using the Alexa toolbar is probably more responsible for the inflation than anything else. I estimate my actual ALexa rank to be between 500,000 and 750,000.
The "daily average" chart shows a few pokes above the 100,000 mark recently and I believe those can probably be counted as 300,000 or so.
Sean
We have made a chart of all our rivals within one sector/country and we find Alexa very useful for seeing 'whose who in the zoo'!
Even if you accept it is not perfect, it still can flag up very valuable data on who is doing well, or, as is often the case, who is just pretending to do well :)
Traffic Graph Tool:
[alexa.com...]
Sample:
<SCRIPT SRC='http://xslt.alexa.com/traffic_graph/js/g/a/3m?url=www.apple.com'></SCRIPT>
Certified Stats:
[alexa.com...]
Sample:
<SCRIPT SRC='http://xslt.alexa.com/site_stats/js/s/a?url=www.apple.com'></SCRIPT>
They have a Traffic Comparison tool as well but I like the individual charts better.
Sean
