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…

What I Use

I use three primary services:

• Alexa
• Google Analytics
• Quantcast

I regularly check my Alexa rank (once a week or so).  I don’t cite to it as a metric for success, but I do use it to track how I am doing against competing blogs.  As I mentioned in my previous statistics post, my industry is not likely to be rigging the system, so I find it a fairly accurate measure.  I figure if I’m looking across my industry, then we’re all about as likely to be measured in the same way–so it’s accurate [enough] against each other.

I compulsively check my Google Analytics reports–as much as twice daily.  I use it to look at where my visitors are coming from (referring sites), what search terms are generating the most traffic (search referrers), what the top content was for the day (content drilldown), and an overall snapshot at visitors, visits, and pageviews for the day.

I regularly check Quantcast (once a week or so).  I find Quantcast to be accurate, if not cynically so (because my Quantcast data is always slightly less than Google Analytics).  Several of my competitors are Quantified as well, so I can easily compare my site to theirs and know I am doing so accurately.  You’ll find most people are rather secretive about their statistics, so it can be hard to analyze competitors.