Social Missive is a blog about blogging, the internet, and all things that could be and would be talked about.

What Statistical Provider to Use & How to Use Them

There are a variety of different sites and programs offering to track and provide you with statistical data. It is daunting, but there are a few key ones that are can be considered industry standard. Some of them are more useful than others, but other times it may depend on your industry.

Alexa used to be an often-cited metric/statistic — your Alexa rank. Alexa ranks and tracks website from users that use their Toolbar. Your Alexa rank is where your web site ranks in terms of traffic/popularity/reach out of all websites. One reason Alexa ranking is not necessarily an important metric is because some web site owners have found a way to trick the mechanism and create a higher than accurate ranking. Another reason is that not enough is known about the Alexa Toolbar population, which means we cannot infer whether it is a normal population or not. There may be bias, which would lead to less accurate results. In my particular industry–beauty–I don’t think many know how to fake Alexa ranking, so I still do keep an eye on my Alexa ranking.

Compete is a web traffic analysis service that provides its service via their toolbar for users, ISPs, etc. According to Wikipedia, Compete has 2 million members as of 2008. One downfall in Compete is that it is often inaccurate for web administrators. For instance, this is the least accurate for my primary blog–by leaps and bounds.

ComScore is a professional tool used by industry big wigs, media relations, public relations, etc. They measure the internet audience by industry and provide key statistics, demographics, and other metrics. They also provide other consulting services, depending on your need. Most people will not be using ComScore themselves, but you might find yourself asked to assign your ComScore traffic to another media entity (many advertising networks make this a requirement). This allows them to include your web site’s traffic into theirs as one big entity.

Google Analytics is likely to be the go-to for site statistics, both on a personal/user level, but also by professionals. Whenever I am asked for proof of my web statistics, I’m asked for my Google Analytics report. I also find that Google Analytics offers just about everything I need to know about my site, from where people click to how many pageviews each post is receiving in a month or day or hour.

Quantcast is similar to Compete, but they do not utilize a toolbar in order to gather statistics about web sites. Web administrators are able to get their site “quantified” by installing the analytics tracking code on their web site, which allows for more accurate measurement by Quantcast. Quantcast also provides extensive data regarding your site’s demographics, wihch can be useful, especially when selling your own advertising.

Sitemeter is a popular web statistics provider, but unfortunately, I have always found it to offer rather inflated statistics. It offers all of the basic statistics (like visitors, pageviews, etc.)

Find out which ones I use and why… Read More »