VentureBeat - Latest Comments in Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Lovepanky — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:59:59 -0000

Hi Matt, looks like your post's still effective. I work for www.lovepanky.com, and we just installed a tracking code of quantcast, and the results are really surprising. I'm using Google Analytics and Getclicky to check my visitor statistics and they're both almost close to each other, with perhaps around 20 to 50 numbers differing each day, which is still reasonable.

I installed the Quantcast code a couple of weeks ago, and it's showing around 10% of the actual visits to the site. I checked the codes again, and it's all showing up when I see the page source. The codes have been installed in the same place, so it's really strange to see such discrepancies.

But all said and done, I guess you're right, none of the measuring sites really don't measure up. I wonder if there will ever be a globally accepted medium that can be trusted wholeheartedly.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Lovepanky — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:58:53 -0000

But all said and done, I guess you're right, none of the measuring sites really don't measure up. I wonder if there will ever be a globally accepted medium that can be trusted wholeheartedly.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

John — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:02:07 -0000

Recommend to check your website statistics on www.surcentro.com

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

ASergiu — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:22:09 -0000

I have seen many such websites that provide traffic information. Among the best I could mention websiteoutlook.com, statbrain.com and cubestat.com. Most if not all of them use Alexa traffic rank to calculate the traffic values. We have also developed a website to calculate traffic information, we base our calculations on Alexa rankings but also on some other various factors(one of the most important being the website's niche) and we believe our traffic calculations are way better than the above mentioned websites. Looking forward to your comments on www.estimix.com

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Bob Murphy — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:51:13 -0000

I thought that Alexa and Compete both did an excellent job ranking my USMLE and ABSITE Review website at http://www.clinicalreview.com. Both of their numbers were in line with what my Stats paged showed.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

mike — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:12:11 -0000

So its safe to say that Quantcast and compete and are saying a lesser amount of people are visiting any given site?

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Chris — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:17:00 -0000

My website went up minimally, however, now it is on a steady downward change, even though the number of alexa users has gone up, and the number of overall users has gone up. WTF? Any ideas?

http://www.vapropertiesinc.com

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Warren Redlich — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:11:59 -0000

We have seen similar errors in Compete and Alexa for our traffic court website. Our traffic has gone up dramatically in the last month (per Google Analytics), yet the stats on Alexa and Compete show us as flat or declining.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Mark — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:38:19 -0000

Compete underestimates us by two-thirds, but at least when our traffic goes up, their estimate goes up (and when traffic goes down, their estimate goes down).

Alexa has a mind of its own and doesn't seem to represent reality at all, as represented by our logs and by Google Analytics and other log analysis programs.

Quantcast has us underestimated by about 60%, but the trend seems accurate.

Alexa is just broken, and I can't believe Jeff Bezos is letting the company rot. They have thrown away their headstart. And that silly feud with Statsaholic: what a distraction, given the opportunity that they should be concentrating on.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

qjanrpzrzn — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:10:24 -0000

Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! fmpgazclihjs

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Pan_theFrog — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:07:17 -0000

While I am a little late to this topic, I've been watching certain sites that are quantified by Quantcast who seem to get next to no visitors, but Quantcast keeps moving them up in rank.
archimedes-lab.org is listed as having had one hit since Jan 23, but estimated to have 10k unique US visitors a month. Rank 138,983.
pimpnflyguy.com shows 5,147 US visitors with no more then 4 visitors a day. Rank 242,598 (Up 4k from yesterday)
betterworld.net shows 4,677 US visitors with no more then 25 visits a day. Rank 264,460.
Any of this making sense?

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Julie Colwell — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 16:47:06 -0000

While Quantcast and Compete both claim to deliver demographics information, it's estimated, not validated. And advertisers have to look up zillions of sites and compile that information themselves to take to publishers before they buy ads. There is only one company that can provide validated demographic information AND ad network partners, so advertisers can search for their target audience and make an ad buy at the same time. Internet research company IPRO. IPRO recently launched their advertising marketplace, SPOTSITE, where advertisers can shop for specific demographics across the thousands of researched web sites.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Search Engines WEB — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 04:51:54 -0000

seoptimization.blog.com/122...

here is a list of the top popular blogs listed by Technorati about 20 of them make their stats public. They represent a wide range of subjects

You can make a comparison with the estimates of Compete and Quantcast estimations to see which is the most accuarte

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Matt Mullenweg — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 22:36:26 -0000

We've been very impressed with Quantcast. I've been testing their code across WordPress.com blogs and its numbers are more accurate than any other public measure I've seen and the demographic data it provides is really interesting.

I also like how they retroactively correct and re-rank sites based on new data that they get in. It's in everyone's interest to have the most accurate data out there as possible.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Matt Marshall — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:07:35 -0000

Adam, I looked at my moderation records, and there's nothing in the queue. Not sure what happened. You can try again, or you can send me the graphics, and I'll post manually.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

TJ Mahony — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:02:27 -0000

Andrew:

Yes, we do offer an API. The first version of our API will go live next week. I am actually a registered member of Competitious, so I would be happy to talk about providing access. Just shoot me an email (see previous post for my address).

Best,
TJ

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

bring down alexa — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:53:55 -0000

I can not understand how alexa got any attention in the first place. It is so flawed and misguiding..if someone wants some proof we can send our own google analytics data and alexa rank.. another major problem- rank shown on Alexa site considers global visitors..it no way reflects any meaningful information ..there are quite a few sites whose rank is way high on alexa just because of global visitors.. For US based sites revenue model is almost always based on US visitors but alexa rank is based on Indian/chinese visitors.. btw, this is one of the reasons blog advertisements don't yield expected results (at least that was our experience when we tried a few well known blogs with very high alexa rank..turned out most of the traffic was from "outsiders")..there has to be some good service to give traffic analysis by state/city/demographics because that is what really matters ..who cares about global rank..may be bloggers can start the trend of making their google analytics data public..

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Adam Bruce — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:51:08 -0000

TJ,
I will email you shortly with links to the snap shots, but those are our Uniques, not "hits". (4.2 Million Uniques of which 71% went to StreetFire the remaining 29% went to other Vidiac.com affiliates), our page views for January for StreetFire were 45,840,994 page Views. StreetFire.net streamed (in-page not embed players) 24 Million videos in January. Actual "hits" were waaaaaaaaaay more than 45 Million last month. I'll put it this way, our 95th percentile Hosting Bill was 1.4 GIG. So 230K users that Compete.com is reporting. is orders of magnitude off. On International 59.42% United States, 10% UK and Canada, So really our Compete number should be 1.79M, but the fact it's reporting 239K? Emailing you screen shots now....

-Adam

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Andrew Holt — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:28:33 -0000

TJ, does Compete offer an API for its data? We would be very interested in talking to you about this.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

TJ Mahony — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 11:58:37 -0000

Adam,

I'd be happy to take a look and provide an explaination. I assume the site you are referring to is streetfire.net

Feel free to email me (tmahony(at)compete.com)your graphs and data points. My first thought was that you attract a high concentration of international users. I took a quick look at Alexa (which is the only decent proxy for international traffic), as a point of comparision, and they measure your site 50% less than Compete.com. Therefore it seems that intl' dynamics are not the cause, since Compete currently attracts ~200K UVs/month.

My gut tells me you are looking at visits or hits and not unique visitors; however, this is only a guess. Again, feel free to email me.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Adam Bruce — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 09:42:01 -0000

Well, I have a comment waiting moderation right now due to the number of web links, bu I'm willing to throw down the gauntlet and show everyone waht or in-house reporting is saying vs, what these services are saying, and I would like to see what TJ Mahoney has to say as justification for the sher magnitudes of diference between the too. In a nutshell, they claim we're doing 239K Uniques a MONTH, but our web stats show we do that in a DAY, and our Monthly is more like 3 Million Unique Users. So Hopefully Matt will approve my posts so you guys can see screen shots of our aalytics vs their reports.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Otis Gospodnetic — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 09:11:19 -0000

Accuracy aside, there is one thing neither Compete nor Quantcast have, and Alexa does - timeliness! Alexa updates more or less daily, while the other two are over a month behind. I can look at Alexa and get a rough idea about the traffic (spike, drop, etc.) of a site from last week or less. With Compete and Quantcast one has to wait over a month. It is almost mid-February and Quantcast and Compete still show only December data!

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Adam Bruce — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 23:28:33 -0000

Update #2: Okay, I've installed the QuanCast.com code on all our StreetFire.net pages. (at approx 11:00 EST on Thursday Evening)

I think all of us would like to see a real life comparison to what Comepte and QuantCast report vs what in-house analytics report. So I'm willing to drop the veil and share our actual in-house results with all of you, as well as a before and after on installing the Quantcast Code

Compete.com says we have 239,723 Unique Monthly Visitors
http://snapshot.compete.com...

QuantCast says we have a little over 100,000 monthly Uniques.
http://www.quantcast.com/st...

Alexa says we have a reach per million of 180..
http://alexa.com/data/detai...

Here is a Screen shot of our Google Analytics Page showing 4.2 Million/month
http://assets.streetfire.ne...
http://assets.streetfire.ne...

This says we did 4.2 million Uniques Vidiac wide (across all our sites). Both our in house Ad Server and Analytics agree that roughly 71% of our Unique visitors go to StreetFire.net which is roughly 3.0 Million visitors plus or minus a few hundred thousand.

So I guess we can check back in a couple of days to see if Quantcast Changes their numbers following pasting their ad-code? All that said I would like for any one of these providers to justify the magnitudes of difference between what they're reporting vs what we're actually getting. NOTE: The Google number is at lest in the same BallPark +/- 20% of our server logs, which we correlate with Unique visitors, video streams, uploads, page views, User accounts, etc.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

TJ Mahony — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 23:12:21 -0000

Matt,

To expand on Lauren's comments, it's important that you note that Compete's projections are 'US projections'. Compete is a well established business that provides incredibly detailed competitive analysis to over 50 of the largest business in the U.S.. In addition, Compete's numbers are actively used in the investment community to predict revenue of online centric businesses. In fact, Compete is a certified resource of Seeking Alpha and are publicly recognized by several financial institutions as a superior source of insight. I invite you to read some of the unsolicited public statments made on Compete's behalf at: http://www.compete.com/test...

Thanks for supporting the conversation.

Re: Measuring traffic? Alexa, Compete, Quantcast all have problems

Adam Bruce — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:53:17 -0000

UPDATE: Apparently I need to familiarize myself with these services a little more. Apparently quantcast.com does exactly what I described above.... of course they to are reporting us waay lower than we actually do so I think they must be pulling from the same data that Compete does.