Do you want to spy (or ‘research’) on your competitors to know how much traffic their sites are getting?
Now there are a bunch of traffic estimation services (like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc.) from where you can obtain statistics (page views + unique visitors) of almost any website for free but is the data accurate? I did a rough comparison using actual data from Google Analytics data and here are the results:
1. Alexa – Alexa won’t tell you the actual page views of a site but an estimate of the percentage of Internet users that may have visited your site during a given period. Now assuming that the number of Internet users did not changed drastically in the past 6 months or so, a site’s reach as determined by Alexa can be proportional to the unique visitors.
Verdict: The Alexa chart pattern for my blog is fairly similar to Google Analytics which is actually very surprising.
2. Trends for Websites – Google Trends uses data from Google search, Google Analytics and other third-party market research services. Since Google search is the largest source of traffic to most websites (especially those in the tech domain), Trends for Website can give a fairly accurate estimate of site traffic.
Verdict: Google Trends estimation of "daily unique visitors" can get very close to actual numbers but the only problem is that Trends doesn’t provide data for low-traffic websites.
3. StatBrain – This is the only service that claims to provide a count of daily visitors to any website. StatBrain does so using data from a number of external sources like Alexa Rank, backlinks in Google, location of web server, etc.
Verdict: StatBrain says that Digital Inspiration gets around 33k unique visitor per day which is definitely on the lower side but still not a very bad guess.
4. Compete – You can use Compete to estimate the total US traffic for nearly every site on the web. Compete uses data from ISPs, their own toolbar and other data source to calculate the unique visitors and hits (or pageviews) of a site.
Verdict: Very close to actual data but limited to visitors from US only so you won’t get the true picture for an international website.
5. QuantCast – Like Compete, QuantCast too gives an estimate of hits and unique visitors along with visitor demographics.
Verdict: Data is not available for all websites and also less accurate than Compete (at least for Digital Inspiration) though the situation may be different for quantified sites.
6. Google Ad Planner – This is my favorite tool that is both accurate and comprehensive. You get to know the traffic of any website in a particular geographic region (or worldwide), average number of visits per visitor, total page views, unique visitors and the broad category of that site.
Here’s how you can use Google Ad Planner to determine the traffic of any website:
1. Click the "Begin Research" tab in your Ad Planner dashboard.
2. Type the URLs of all websites that you want to research in the "Sites Visited" section of "Online Activity"
3. You’ll see that all those sites now appear on the right side. Click the name of the site to view the traffic and demographic details of that site.
Verdict: Highly recommended.
Bonus Tip: If you need to check the rankings of any website on multiple services in one go, try Dataopedia or Attention Meter. Both these services offer traffic graphs from Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc. on the same page.
Also see: Know Everything About a Web Site
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/find-website-traffic-hits/8008/
Tags: alexa, Archives, compete, lists, Most Popular, seo, spy, Internet
Reader Comments
I wasn’t Aware that Alexa was giving traffic estimates? I thought their numbers came from counts of browsers with the Alexa toolbar installed?
Written by Frank on 03.18.09
Do you think that the data present in these charts are close to the real data?
Written by Krishna on 03.18.09
Very helpful… thanks. I used to use Alexa as a marker but found it can be very inaccurate at times. Google analytics seems like a fairly good marker. Checking out “trends” now :)
Written by Matthew Loop on 03.18.09
Thanks for this Amit. It’s being a very difficult job for me to find such a tool that can reveal anysites traffic stats. I was curious to know Labnol’s traffic. Now i got it,i.e 37000+ ;)
Written by Technology Blog on 03.18.09
Great, informative post! Thanks for the tips.
Also, I just noticed a rendering bug in the text inputs for name, email, etc. They seem to overlap a little for me, so you can’t actually see the right side of name and email. I’m running Firefox 3 on Gentoo Linux, though, so it’s pretty likely the is only for a few readers.
Written by Noah on 03.18.09
Nice list
i really like the quantcast i wonder if that is accurate and how do they really find out the gender through IP’s?
Written by Priyanekshu on 03.18.09
Nice. Google Ad planner is something new for me. Worth checking it out.
Written by Harry on 03.18.09
Google Ad Planner is really new information for me. Thank you. Let me check it out
Written by dotcompals on 03.18.09
Statbrain (you mentioned it earlier too), according to me is not reliable source of info. it states that my website (dayal.co.in) gets 635 visits per day. That’s quite high !!! :D
Written by Amol on 03.18.09
Google adplanner is something really unknown to me. Its strange though since I am always curious to know about anything started by google. Thanks for the good tips.
Written by hitesh sahni on 03.19.09
Statbrain is not reliable at all. It states that my blog gets 846 visits whereas the real thing is that it gets between 12000 and 15000 :-)
(have a look on Google Trends which is much more accurate and near from the truth)
Written by Eric on 03.19.09
Well not all services give you the actual traffic stats.
Alexa and google trends are the almost accurate ones.
Written by v1dz on 03.19.09
Many of them do not give right data. As I found a site which is Alexa ranking of 12000 and when you check same for other listed site it shows that it is getting only 1800 visitors per day.
I don’t think that there is any reliable service which can give right data for other site.
Written by Ravi Ahuja on 03.20.09
I have noted down the name of all the traffic tracking websites. Let us judge which one gives the most accurate results. I think statbrain is good but it’s accuracy varies much. For some site is shows very low traffic and for some websites it display much more traffic than the normal.
Written by Royalblogger on 03.20.09
Amit its a good post. but these sites only show the stats of heavy traffic sites, can i have such kind of site which can show me the detailed states of any low traffic site???
Written by Asif on 03.20.09
When you search StatBrain about Labnol [http://www.statbrain.com/www.labnol.org/] you got around 33k unique visitor per day,now once again search using [http://www.statbrain.com/labnol.org/],i.e without ‘www’.Explain the reason?
Written by Coolefriend on 03.26.09
Thanks for the round up Amit. The Google media planner has been a real opener. It gave insights about my competition in an accurate manner.
Written by Word counter tool on 03.30.09