Over the last week, we've collected visitor traffic data from 25 popular websites in the search and online marketing space, including:
- Brian Clark from Copyblogger
- Aaron Wall from SEOBook
- Matt Cutts from MattCutts.com
- Danny Sullivan from Daggle
- Mike Davidson from MikeIndustries (he also runs Newsvine)
- and many more...
We're thrilled to be able to share this data in a way that illustrates the relative values of real visitor analytics vs. external metrics from competitive intelligence services. In the report, we've compared data from services like:
- Alexa
- Compete.com
- Ranking.com
- Netcraft.com
- Technorati
Sadly, the findings aren't particularly encouraging from a marketer's/researcher's point-of-view, but it does provide fantastically accurate insight that I don't believe is available anywhere else.
Check it out:
Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics
A big thanks to all the participants; it's fantastically generous of all of you to contribute your competitive data so that others might learn. Please go visit their sites to help show your appreciation.
p.s. Frankly, I was shocked about the relative traffic levels of some of the folks on the list. You've got to see it to believe it.
Rand, I know some log analyzers include requests for the RSS/XML page as part of the visitors count. This could obviously vary a lot of numbers among those included.
Great job pulling that together Rand. I think the thing that surprises me the most is although those blogs are getting a ton of traffic most are not getting a lot of comments to their posts. Maybe the majority are reading the feeds and then moving on to their next feed. I think comments are a good indicator of how well the bloggers are engaging their audience and then again that could just be my perception.
David - great point. I wonder if comments could be any sort of indicator of popularity, but I know that, for example, SERoundtable is much more well-read than SEOmoz, but with far fewer comments. Matt Cutts gets slightly fewer visits than we do (mostly due to our appearances on Digg, IMO) but far more comments.
Maybe not for popularity but influence - because the community is more involved if there are a lot of comments...
Great study. But, I do have one concern. To determine the predictors of traffic, you're comparing each service with "actual" traffic. But, the way each site measures "actual" traffic is not defined. I suspect some might be using log file analyzers, others might be using page tagging, etc. So, you're not necessarily comparing apples to apples.
Regardless, this quote should be plastered all over the web for the people that swear by Alexa... Services like Alexa, Ranking.com, Compete.com & Netcraft are nearly useless when it comes to predicting traffic or comparing relative levels of popularity, even when used on a highly comparable set of sites in a similar field
Superb stuff - thanks Rand.
To randfish
Thought the analysis in the posting was excellent and very informative.
In the survey, you note that Technorati's Blog tracking data on links had the highest correlation with traffic.
I have looked for the link tracking tool on the Technorati site, but cannot find it.
As we are looking to develop a way to prioritize sites for conducting PPc campaigns, so need a tool/metric with high correlation to traffic. Though imperfect, I would like to be able to evaluate the Technorati link tracking tool for use in our research.
Please direct me to where the blog link tracking tool is, so I can utilize it in our efforts. Thanks.
Regards
Mike
Wonderful, yet depressing :-( What are we to do?
I was wondering whether you had seen Quantcast? They offer a wealth of info - but again, I only have my own personal data to work with so it's challenging to assess.....
Does anyone know how accurate ComScore ratings are (think I'll skip looking into Hitwise :-) ......
Struggling in the land of competitive intelligence.....
Rand:
Great work, but it leaves me with a couple of questions.
1. Are all of the analytics tools providing the data the same? Page tagging and log file collection methods give some pretty drastically different numbers.
2. Did you break down each of the predictors by site to see if any of them were more accurate for specific sites then they were across the board. I am not quite clear enough on your data to to this myself, but it would be really great to say that, for example, Technorati is within 15% for page tagging analytic approaches but only within 42% for log file analysis.
I took a quick look at the comments, but didn't see this noted. Rand, I saw vast differences in site metrics between sites that I would have thought would be close. Did you ask each respondent to declare the analytics package they use?
I've tried running different analytics services on the same site, and have seen huge differences - especially between script and log analytics.
In an ideal world, you would ask each respondent to use the same analytics tool.
Just my 2 cents.
I kept thinking about this, too, and one of the ways I tried to address it was to use "visits" rather than unique visitors, which should be fairly solid for most analytics packages, unless, as you say, they count spiders.
The stats package for my blog only reports "unique visitors", not "visits", therefore my data may be the orange amongst the apples. It's an interesting project though.
Rand,
How did you estimate the top five predictors of actual website traffic? I did a little statisical analysis and got the following list which is a little different than your list.
1. Technorati Links 2. Yahoo! Links 3. Technorati Rank 4. Compete Rank 5. Alexa Rank
I blogged about it here.
It is ironic that the top three metrics aren't even meant to be a measure of traffic but they are the most highly correlated with actual traffic.
cs - you rock. My methodology was not nearly as sound (of course, doing it at 1:15am does have that effect). I've used yours and referenced it. Thanks a ton!
Great work Rand!
What surprises me most is that - as you said - ironically only a small share of traffic comes from search engines. Any idea why? Does it mean that most of the traffic is by people interested in seo to learn it instead of potential clients? I guess a regular client with little to no knowledge about seo would type in some phrases in google...
Martin: as i've found out on one of my tech sites, css3.info, only 18% of the traffic there over the last 6 months has come through search engines. It would be interesting to do this research on a wider range of websites, and see what the majority of websites get's it visitors from. That would mean the research should be done not just in one niche, and not just on blogs, but on a wide range of sites spread over different niches.
>>>particularly those folks at the lower end of the site popularity spectrum
LOL, and you're welcome. ;-) I'll admit, I almost didn't. With not having stats at all til end Aug (everyone always thinks I'm kidding when I say it isn't a focus for me LOL) and being down for a total of a week in September with a slew of not my hosting companys fault problems, I almost didn't give you my stats. ;-)
>>>delivering a limited description with their feed while others deliver a complete feed
I had thought about that as well - forcing a visit to read the post could skew numbers for those showing full posts in their feeds. Rand, you may want to make note of whether the participants show full feeds or snippets - it actually is something important to look at.
I think another interesting thing would be the average comments per post - whether "involvement" is directly related to traffic volume.
Oh, and also average number of posts per month. I know I visit the blogs of those blogging more frequently than those that I know are updated once in a blue moon. (I don't do feeds, I hand visit, I'm so stone ages LOL.)
"Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines"
This is what caught my eye the most as well... Too funny... ;)
Excellent post. I have a constant battle to try and explain why tools like Alexa should not be used as actual traffic measurements - maybe this will belp me!
And I guess that the reason that the %age of traffic from engines is low, is that the people who are interested in these subjects probably search for a blogger once, then sign up for RSS feeds; a "normal" person on the other hand might well use an engine to find a site, even if they visit it several times a month. I have certainly seen people use Google to get to a site that they know the URL of.
Interesting list.
One thing you should keep in mind: For example Stuntduble, Aaron Wall and David Naylor are only delivering a limited description with their feed while others deliver a complete feed. Because of this it is hard to compare the total readership of this blogs.