Like many bloggers I had used the usual systems of analytics measurement to determine a sites popularity and leveraged these as kind of my framework for comparing my own blog success. These metrics included Alexa Rating, Compete.com rankings, Google PageRank among some smaller ones like Technorati Rank.
Recently I realized how misleading these public measurement systems can be at determining how much traffic or popularity a site has. In working with a fellow blogger who had SEO and marketing questions I was privy to a blog that had an Alexa rating of 75k, a Compete ranking showing only about 9k unique visits per month.
The blogger had explained to me that they had a reach of more than ¼ of a million readers each month and had over 1/3 of a million pageviews each month, yet none of the metrics on the public measurement websites I traditionally used saw anything to support this claim.
Sure enough the user provided me full analytics view access and I did see the website had over 260,000 unique visits and 320+ thousand pageviews in a single month. This site only opened in February 2010 and had a massive reach which also included 6,000 RSS subscribers yet for some reason the public sites didn’t reflect this in rankings or statistics.
I learned that the site had 60% of its traffic coming from direct sources and another 25% coming from referral sites, with only 15% coming from search engine traffic. This led me to the conclusion that Alexa, Compete and other sites have no ability to see anything but search engine traffic that leads to your site and estimate based on this. This means sites that rely heavily on direct or referral traffic have artificially lower Alexa ratings than they should and this can be misleading.
I mentioned that to entice advertisers who have no ability to see the true metrics of a blog, the blog had to create a clear “advertise” page and show the true Google Analytics metrics showing how much traffic the site receives. Most advertisers have no ability to see private site analytics and use the same public ranking systems for guesstimating the popularity of a website and in this case it can cause some sites to be undervalued publicly yet they have strong standing analytics behind the scenes.
Where Are Accurate Analytics?
Nothing beats a legitimate analytics service where tracking code is installed site wide and can provide accurate measurements for how much traffic a website is receiving. Google Analytics is the best free site analytics tool that I know of but there are several paid ones and some other free ones that let you install tracking cookies.
I couldn’t find anything that showed Alexa had tracking code you could install for more accurate site traffic collection.
The bottom line is that you can’t always trust public website ranking systems for true analytics and metrics like Google PageRank, Alexa Score among many other websites that estimate traffic can be significantly off. The one thing that I notice is that in most cases only PageRank can overestimate or value a site from my own experiences. I have seen websites with less than fifty visits a day that can manage to be slotted for a PageRank 5 or above and this is highly prized by advertisers for SEO sculpting but ultimately it is traffic and readership that attract advertisers.
Twitter: danalingga
says:
I use Google Analytics as main source to measure my blog popularity and wordpress.com stats as secondary.
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Twitter: lavenderuses
says:
Hi Justin
Does all this analysing out traffic, ranking, PR really mean we are successful bloggers? Or more importantly successful business owners?! Like you point out in this article, some sites don’t have many visitors but high page rank; while conversely others with huge amount of traffic have no page rank!
I get so confused with all this and decided early on I would just concentrate on writing consistently and produce content-rich posts for my readers. The rest will happen if and when Google rank me. So far they have been kind to my small niche blog and I will continue to keep on keeping on. Just my 2 cents.
Patricia Perth Australia
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Twitter: dragonblogger
says:
PageRank does not necessarily measure a blog’s success, after all if you stand up a website and it gets only 10 visits per month but has no outbound links it will likely have a PR2 or higher by default. I created a static site and did nothing with it and it had a PR4 within 5 months but had 5 visits a month average.
PageRank however can mean your site is indexed and linked to by a lot of sites online, typically when a site is PR5 or 6 and higher your site is starting to have a pretty decent reach, though PR3 and lower sites can be further along and just have some PR penalties for one reason or another.
Justin Germino´s recent blog post ..When Pageview Analytics Just Don’t Match Up
Twitter: ashlieSEO
says:
I agree with you. A lot of emphasis is put on the ranking and indexing of a site. I have seen people write articles merely to get better search rank and higher pagerank. This is sad to me. The idea is to sell to customers and the best way to do that is to write to your customers and for rank second.
There are plenty of strategies out there for getting better rankings. Thank you for writing to your audience and not some search bot.
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Twitter: Andre_Kalis
says:
Justin, you’re touching a sensitive subject for me, because different stats tools give me different results. I had my site tested by a company who said my site receives between 400 and 500 visitors a day, but my Google Analytics numbers are much below that. How does one explain this?
My Alexa ranking is 262 000 at the moment. What approximate number of visitors does a site receive with such Alexa ranking?
I haven’t yet made use of Google Webmaster tools, but I’m starting today. Perhaps by implementing those I might be able to get more accurate figures. I don’t know.
I have heard from some highly reputable SEO companies that Google PR is not all that important anymore and that you site’s reputation is more determined by the number and quality of inbound links. So, if you have a good PR but little traffic from search engines, you probably need back links or inbound links.
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Twitter: dragonblogger
says:
Alexa doesn’t just rank on visitors, but unique sites backlinking in are also factored into your Alexa ranking. Alexa also can only see search engine traffic so if you have lots of referral or direct traffic your number may be lower. I also noticed that having an Alexa badge on your homepage tends to improve your Alexa ratings drastically.
When seeing disparate rankings find out if the sites do filters based on certain inbound traffic, GA is really good about filtering out bots, spiders and content it doesn’t deem as “human” traffic.
Justin Germino´s recent blog post ..When Pageview Analytics Just Don’t Match Up
Different stats tools does give me different results too and the stats program provided by my web host provider shows a much higher figure than Google Analytics.
Adsense also has a different result so I have more or less given up on this popularity measurement issue as long as I have income everyday.
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Twitter: dragonblogger
says:
A web hosting provider will always show more traffic because they do no filtering of bots and calls to other resources on your page. Remember every image, .js and .css file is loaded from same page, so whenever 1 page loads on your site it is like 20-30 calls to your site to load the various content components of that page. GA filters out the junk and non-true calls. A really good measure is that my BuySellAds slot shows how many impressions per month it gets, these are true pageloads and are very close to GA Pageviews (not unique visits).
AdSense is fairly accurate as well as many bots/ip’s won’t load javascript and count against those as a pageview.
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If you are an advertiser interested in advertising on a particular website I think the best thing you can do is ask the site owner if you can get take a look at their Google Analytics or a legitimate analytics service similar to that.
It would definitely be foolish to just use page rank or alexa rank to determine the traffic flow of a site. I have recognized the inaccuracy of alexa rank for a good while now.
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Twitter: Andre_Kalis
says:
Thank you, I’m much clearer now. I’m off to grab the Alexa badge. I hear Google webmaster tools are very helpful too – a further assignment for the day
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Twitter: BasicBlogTips
says:
Hey Justin, your client has some very impressive stats. I’m curious to learn more about your strategy to overcome the challenge of getting the word out to advertisers about the site’s traffic. Do you have any tips for how they are able to achieve so much direct traffic? They must have an awesome product or service to bring traffic in that way.
I’ve been watching an advanced Google Analytics tutorial module on Lynda dot com and there are some really insightful tips that typical users aren’t aware of. For example, if Google Analytics can’t figure out where traffic is coming from (for various reasons including users that disable tracking settings in their browsers) the visits will show up as direct traffic. Is it possible something like that might be the case with your client?
I hope we can talk more about this.
Excellent post!
Ileane Smith´s recent blog post ..Video Blogging Women On The Rise
Twitter: dragonblogger
says:
Yes its possible, clicks from emails will show up as direct traffic and clicks from RSS readers may as well. Again the site had 6,000 RSS subscribers and heavy referral traffic. It is a video photography site for amateurs and professionals and is very focused and showing video content to show how to do things with a camera. The sites video’s are often embedded and published on many other high profiles sites and there are over 500,000 views on some of the sites YouTube video’s.
The company sells no services for purchase and has very minimal ads except for AdSense at this time.
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These inaccurate stats can be a pain in the butt when you are looking to buy a website. I often look at websites for sale on Flippa and if I dig a bit deeper and often get a red flag. People can push traffic to a website from paid sources, their other websites, even guest posting. This will bring the alexa ranking down and the stats up.
I would always prefer to get a website with search engine traffic as it is more transparent.
For your own website google analytics is good enough.
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Twitter: dragonblogger
says:
That is a good point, if I were to purchase an existing website I would demand to have GA access to be able to validate sources of traffic. It is easy to rule out invalid or fake traffic if you can get access to their analytics. For sites that don’t use GA, then I would use Compete.com as a framework guess since it apparently can only base on organic search traffic estimates.
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Justin, I’m not sure that the limitation of Alexa rankings has to do with whether the traffic is direct or from search engines. From what I understand, the Alexa ranking depends on users who have the Alexa bar installed which is why marketing blogs or blogs about blogging typically have artificially low Alexa numbers (since their readers often use the Alexa toolbar).
I’ve seen blogs that get a couple thousand unique visitors per day have Alexa rankings of 200-300k. At the same time, I’ve seen blogs with 100k Alexa rankings that get 30-40 unique visitors per day only.
Either way though, you’re right that it’s difficult to get public data on search traffic for websites.
For those who want their stats to be available for public (for advertisers), Quantcast is a free and easy to install option (add tracking code).
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Twitter: dragonblogger
says:
This blurb is taken from Alexa help page exactly as is:
What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach)
This means they use other means of traffic estimates, not just Alexa toolbar, this is how I am basing that they must have some sort of estimates from search engine results or other analytics to base a site for ranking as well.
Justin Germino´s recent blog post ..Software Contest- Rescue Your iTunes Library with SyncPod
Alexa rank will also reflect traffic from other sources, not just from search engines…but it’s still useless unless you have traffic stats for a website in the same niche, with the same type of visitors.
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