I'm a big fan of the new stats tracking service Compete. Unlike Alexa, Compete uses ISP data in addition to its toolbar data. This makes for a much more representative sample, in my opinion, and provides data which is much less skewed towards technical users (who are savvy enough to know that installing the Alexa toolbar will help public perception of their traffic).
I realize that I occasionally read too much into stuff, but I find Alexa to be an utterly corrupt measure of traffic. It overstates the traffic of sites with lots of technical users, which subsequently influences those same technical users to promote their overly optimistic Alexa stats.
As I wrote on Matt Cutts' blog:
I think the presence of Alexa as the only public stats tracker did a real disservice to the webmaster community. Sites that no “regular person” has ever heard of are awarded Alexa kingpin status, just because of the SEO’s with Alexa toolbars who visit them. It just adds to an unhealthy lack of self awareness between (pick one) the webmaster / seo / web 2.0 / silicon valley crowd, and everybody else. In a nutshell, Alexa’s wildly misleading stats catering to those of us who have an Alexa toolbar is just an incestuous, borderline corrupt relationship of convenience.
But I don't think that third party, traffic estimators like Compete are going to be the long term answer here. I think we need some real transparency.
Returning to the world of widgets, I think that the public stats world is crying out for widget that displays a snapshot of some limited traffic data, direct from a Web sites server or javascript based stats package. The obvious candidate to offer something like this would be Google Analytics. A check box on their free service could allow users to "make my stats public." Of course, a widget would be generated that would serve as a seal of transparency on the host site.
Just as Google disrupted the stat tracking industry by offering Google Analytics for free, they could conceivably take a big chunk out of third party stats trackers like Comscore and Nielsen by allowing participating sites to opt to make their Google Analytics stats public.
If I'm Google however, I'm torn between wanting to disrupt yet another market, and my desire to keep all the juicy traffic data to myself.
Comments