Traffic Analysis Wesbites

[Trevor DumbletonParticipant]

Traffic figures are always finger in the air unless it’s your own site.

Compete used to be fairly OK for US figures but hopelessly wrong for UK based sites. The problem is that they’re like TV viewing figures – extrapolated (math term for guesswork) from small data.

Just checked and Quantcast gave me no results for a site I look after that has around 100k visitors/week. TrafficEstimate was out by a factor of 40 (it guessed 10k visits/month rather than over 400k)

Alexa is based on the people who voluntarily install their toolbar in a browser so position ranks are heavily skewed but are kind-of useful in comparing similarish sites in similarish niches.

[Rick SmithParticipant]

Trevor –

I know traffic figures can a shot in the dark at best and several orders of magnitude off at worst. And Sean says right in the audios that the figures are estimates.

[Trevor DumbletonParticipant]

Been a while since I listened to those particular audios but in my view they are the internet equivalent of reading tea leaves or entrails 🙂

Plus even the same site can vary wildly in popularity – forums tell you that with post and view counts. I can’t find the precise reference but I remember reading that the Guardian newspaper has wildly different page view counts for their articles with most closer to ghost town levels than they’d like.

Track once you start getting some traffic: most log analysis programs will show who referred people to your site. Until then it’s probably down to gut reaction.

[Rick SmithParticipant]

Trevor –

Good dose of reality. Thanks.

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