I'd be interested to hear what free tools and services people use to gauge levels of traffic and the nature of the audience to any website?
Obviously this information is useful for competitive intelligence, media planning and buying, search optimisiation, online PR, affiliate marketing etc.
Following are the ones we use:
1. Quantcast
We use this to look at other sites and we've also put the Quantcast tag on our site so you can see data on Econsultancy there. From what we can tell it is reasonably accurate (because of the tag and directly measured traffic) compared to our actual figures and compared to those services which are based on toolbar data (like Alexa).
2. Alexa
Most people know of Amazon-owned Alexa which bases its stats on data collected via its toolbar. Econsultancy is listed here too and the quality and accuracy of the information has improved over the years but still isn't as accurate as Quantcast as it is sample-based.
3. Compete.com
This seems to be gaining increasing traction, particularly in the US. It's got some quite nice interfaces and site-to-site comparison tools. The data accuracy isn't bad and it pulls through some useful other data (e.g. search and referral analytics) though you have to pay for the Pro version to get fuller details. The Econsultancy Compete profile looks a bit odd due to our change of domain at the end of last year but it's becoming more accurate now.
This is a relatively new service from Google (still in their "Labs"). It's useful for trends, and site comparisons, and is quite good for seeing the geographic coverage and reach of a particular site, as well as getting some insight into competing sites through the 'also visited' data. Again, the Econsultancy profile is a bit skewed by our recent domain change but looks like impressive growth!
This is quite a nifty new entrant. There is no proprietary data provided by dataopedia but it does a good job of pulling together data from a wide range of sources. These include all of above, but are further supplemented by measures of popularity by pulling through data from the likes of StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Google News, Twitter etc. There is also company information, domain/technical information, PageRank etc. The Econsultancy.com profile is somewhat skewed by our recent domain name change but is starting to reflect actual figures.
What do you use? What do you find to be most useful, most accurate etc?
Reader comments (8)
SEO Manager at Amnesia Razorfish
11:25AM on 1st May 2009
Thanks for the list, it is useful that people get their research from more than one location and average the results.
1) Quantcast - I love this tool
2) Alexa - used to be good, but no longer accurate, most trusted source thou...
3) Compete - the new interface is great, but their paid is overpriced/unflexible
4) Google Trends - a very large australian site with years of history shows no data other than it gets some australian visitors, a bit below average
5) Dataopedia - could it be true love? The only issue is that you should be able to flag the preview window for an manual update.
I would suggest Lookery Web Data it has moved to a paid solution, but it does offer a number of pieces of data.
SEO Manager at Amnesia Razorfish
11:38AM on 1st May 2009
@Adam I agree that there are tools like Adplanner which are amazing, but they have limited the product in so many ways, sometimes its annoying trying to filter down the data.
The biggest problem is that outside USA demographic data is really really hard to get in accurate figures. Quantcast & Lookery can provide that data for Australia/NZ based sites.
CEO at SciVisum.co.uk
9:15AM on 5th May 2009
Hmm, for Quantcast's eConsultancy data, I see that the_Geographic_ tab says that NewYork in the _States_ list has less unique cookies (3,905) than New York City alone, (the DMA list - 4,559).
That sounds like a contradiction? Or am I missing something?
Deri
11:33AM on 5th May 2009
what do people think of statbrain.com
SEO Manager at Amnesia Razorfish
8:59AM on 7th May 2009
@DeriJones
that comment did have me stumped so i had to research it a little more, I typically dont look much at this data because what limited demographic data you get around Australia sites you dont want to segment down to nothing...
DMA "designated market area" it seems that this is a geographic area defined by Nielsen Media Research Company, so I would have thought these figures would have been reversed with Nielsen having more accurate/lower figures, unless it included close geographic locations.
I tested my idea based on the defintion of DMA it includes areas such as New Jersey, which is technically another state, there is no DMA location for Jersey, so Quantacast still looks good, maybe they could include some more details around definitions onsite.
Ive used statbrain in the past, but its data is not accurate enough, and doesnt include other useful demographic/audience data.
10:00AM on 28th May 2009
A good and more accurate alternative to statbrain is webtraffic24.com. It shows much more stats also
11:05AM on 16th September 2009
Hi! I have found another website traffic and value estimator site. I'm talking about http://www.estimix.com. The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.
8:37AM on 21st October 2009
Google Analytics anyone? Or is that not cool....
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