Google Trends For Websites

[engine]

Google Trends For Websites [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com] http://trends.google.com/websites

a new layer to Trends with Google Trends for Websites, a fun tool that gives you a view of how popular your favorite websites are, including your own! It also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.

[steveb]

This could reveal a nefarious Japanese conspiracy to spam logs, or...

It could reveal Google released another less than mediocre product.

I think I'll bet the latter.

[physics]

Google Trends is apparently already being used in a court case

The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for ...

What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer [nytimes.com]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:23 pm (utc) on June 24, 2008]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[ddogg]

Completely inaccurate for me, by a factor of 3. Another useless release by Google. Compete is much better (at least for US data).

[drasheed]

I own about 100 domains, and from what I can tell Google Trends for Websites currently systematically under estimates traffic by a considerable factor (around 3-5 times). Clearly, they are not using Google Analytics as their basis for these stats.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:40 pm (utc) on July 5, 2008]

[signor_john]

It's a bit early to dismiss Google Trends for Websites because it's imperfect. The alternatives are imperfect, too, and they've been around a lot longer.

Like other Google products (and other software products generally), Google Trends for Websites will improve over time.

[drasheed]

There is no doubt they will kill off the competition as they make improvements. Looking over the data again, I am not sure they are counting subdomain traffic. But it's too hard to tell based on the documentation.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:14 pm (utc) on July 5, 2008]
[edit reason] removed off-topic discussion [/edit]

[nomis5]

A whole pile of specific objections and criticisms of Google Trends have been posted but I see it different. I've looked at the information on competitors (and my sites as well) and it's an eye-opener that I broadly believe. Yes, the absolute detail may be flawed but the big picture has that ring of truth to it. I'm using the information and acting on it.

Dave

[AjiNIMC]

Google has a lot of data, they can really make it cool. Previously they used to show the number but now it is only comparison graph, there is no exact number.

For a website that gets its maximum traffic from Google will give a very close approximation. The traffic is an approximation of the people coming to your website from Google.

[signor_john]

Previously they used to show the number but now it is only comparison graph, there is no exact number.

Google Trends for Websites displays approximate numbers on the grid if you're logged into your Google account. But, as others have mentioned, the graph's numbers aren't the same as those from Google Analytics. (For my main site, the Trends graph shows about 60% as many unique visitors as Analytics does.)

[Ajaxunion]

Check this out [trends.google.com...]

I would just use it to know what sites are really related...

What keywords are really related according to this tool

Its nice to see what google is doing.

[Ajaxunion]

They wont show you google.com but they do show you yahoo results... very interesting...

[trends.google.com...]

[steveb]

I see a few very popular websites that have a flatline (zero) for the past several months.

The thing just seems buggy in the extreme.

[stuartmcdonald]

That drop off is often just for one region -- if you change the region to All you'll often get the data back.

[bstring]

Sorry for bumping an old thread -

We accidentally turned the sharing options in analytics ON, a while back. It was a very unpleasant surprise to discover that the our data all of a sudden was shown openly.

We immediately turned the sharing option OFF (probably ~2 months back) - but the data is STILL showing up to this date! :(

We have emailed Google but no answer - has someone got experience from this? How can we tell Google not to show our data openly in "Trends For Websites"?

Any help would be deeply appreciated!