As a follow up to the previous post on Competitive Intelligence for online markeitng I put together a chart that compares the services of Alexa, Compete.com, Quantcast, Hitwise, Comscore and Neilsen Netratings.

Compare Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Hitwise, Comscore, Neilsen Netrankings

Alexa, Alexa, Alexa…

www.Alexa.com

Not a week goes by that I do not have someone bring up Alexa reporting and say that is says so and so is getting more traffic than so and as so. People/competitors/consultants refer to Alexa traffic reporting as a justification for some of the services or products they are recommending. For those of you not familiar with Alexa, it is a website traffic measuring service that aims to provide free competitive intelligence to the masses.

My problem with Alexa is that it’s data is far from accurate. I am not going to get int to a rant about the inaccuracies as more than enough people have already exposed these issues.

Here are a few examples:
http://www.thenetfool.com/when-alexa-attacks/
http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/utilities/alexa/
http://www.e-consultancy.com/forum/101280-how-accurate-is-alexa-for-traffic-measurement.html

Why is it inaccurate?
Ok, I lied I’m going to rant.

The short story is that it only tracks web traffic from people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. Do you have it installed? I don’t and I do not know anyone that does. So anyone that does not have the Alexa toolbar installed will not be counted in the website traffic. Of course if you install the Alexa widget into your site than it can more accurately track your websites traffic.

But why add the widget/tracking to your site? Who cares about what Alexa says? Well Alexa makes it’s traffic data public including the traffic data about your website. So if you do not have the tracking widget installed you will look like you are getting less traffic than a website that has this tracking installed..

So the logic here is; include the Alexa tracking widget or we will shame you by displaying innacurate data about your site. Data that will most likely make it appear that your online efforts are falling short comapred to competitors. The uninformed marketer often sees a reference to Alexa report and gets worried that their online efforts are failing. For this, Alexa, you are doing more harm than good.

Don’t get me wrong Alexa is an entertaining product and if luck is on my side and shows that my sites are getting more traffic than competitors, it puts a smile on my face. But that is as useful as it gets.  I certainly would not build any strategy around Alexa reporting.

Compete.com

Compete
Compete seemed to have started out with the same agenda as Alexa but has morphed into a slightly more useful tool. Sure it’s traffic reporting is still very much an estimate. Currently their sample size is 2 million US Internet users. Unlike Alexa it collects data via toolbars, surveys, Aggregate data from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like AOL* and Comcast* and Applications Service Providers (ASPs) Like web mail*.

So, they are getting a broader mix of internet users in their sample and I would trust Compete.com over Alexa.com but still wouldn’t make any important decision based solely on their reports.

*AOL COMCAST and web mail are examples of ISPs and ASPs  only and are note  necessarily associated with Compete.com

Quantcast

How accurate is Quantcast data? Well, it collects data via a mix of sources similar to Compete.com. Sources include  advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks. It’s “Media Planner” service is still branded as beta but looks very promising so far.

Professional Competitive Services.
Aside from the services mentioned above there are pay services that can can collect much more targeted information. The three big companies in this space are Comscore, Hitwise and Neilson Netrating. These service are excellent, but very expensive for a small business. Usually in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.  My experience with these services have revealed that they are most useful for major Internet brands and and large business. When it comes to a small website or a local brand for a small to medium sized business, there just isn’t enough data to reveal anything more than what Compete or Quantcast.

Check back for a more detailed comparison of these companies.

What are your experiences with these services? Is there another you would recommend?

Recently I was asked to look over a friend’s company web traffic for “fun”. I was happy to do it out of curiosity and to be helpful. They asked me to review the traffic because they were unsure of what they were seeing and after reviewing it myself I am not sure what I am looking at either.

While poking through the stats I noticed that 75% of their traffic was direct. As in 3 out of 4 of their website visitors landed on the site by punching in the domain perfectly. This seemed odd so I compared it to some other sites I have managed that are similar in size and industry and marketing efforts. What I saw was that typically each site has a more distributed source list of referral sources. Typically 40-45% percent of referral traffic coming from Search Engines, 25-35 % direct traffic and the remainder from other websites.

Digging deeper I noticed that the bounce rate for the site was quite high. (On average 75% or greater)
Hmm, 75% of the traffic is direct and 75% or more of the visitors leave immediately regardless of the page they entered the site on. Something is not right here.

To gather more information I looked at what sites out there were referring traffic. I found one or two paid referrals / purchased a banner advertisement which was expected, but beyond that I found hundreds of random websites driving traffic to this website. So I wanted to see what these sites were.  They were clearly spam sites, porn sites and sites displaying nothing but Google ad sense.

So here is the questionable data:

•  75% of all traffic is direct (this is not a big internet brand but a small local business with basic SEO in place)
• 75% or greater bounce rate on every page
• The slim search engine traffic it does receive is only coming from MSN (This is strange considering the small market share of MSN compared to Google or Yahoo.)
• Overall Traffic, in terms of visit session is up about 60% this year.
  Of course the client is happy to see the higher traffic numbers but based on what we are seeing is this traffic real?

My initial thoughts are that one of the following is happening:

1.  This is a poor linking strategy / scam – meant to boost website traffic figures but without regard for traffic quality.
2. The reporting is set up incorrectly- This is possible and it would explain the high numbers for direct traffic and the high bounce rate. However, it does not explain the odd referring websites
3. This is site is a true anomaly – receiving a lot of direct traffic from people that did not want to visit the site and leave immediately.

Based on what I have seen in the reporting and what I know of the company managing this site, I believe this is a paid linking strategy boosting traffic number but harming the clients brand and understanding of their own efforts.

If anyone has any similar experiences let me know. Have you seen website traffic referral distributions like this before? Are these stats telling tale signs of paid linking? Can anyone explain how a site indexed in all major search engines only receives traffic from MSN?

 Just passing this link around. www.Stormpulse.com is a great site to take you hurricane tracking anxiety/obsession to a whole new level.

Stormpulse.com

It can show all the projected models, the history of a hurricanes path and distances to major cities from the eye of the storm over time. All of this is presented in a google maps style interface.

Google Chrome

If you have not heard yet, Google released it’s own web browser yesterday named Chrome. 

My first impressions are good. It is fast, based on web-kit, has some unique features, it is fast, has an excellent built in inspector for developers,  an “incognito” setting that helps to keep you a little more anonymous on the web, and once again it renders web pages really fast.

However, this morning I received an email from a friend who diligently reviewed the User License and found some pretty surprising items.

This is what he highlighted:

 

11. Content license from you

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

    11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.     

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license. 

Now I think what this means is that if I used Google Chrome to make this very post they own the post. As the owner of this post they can do what ever they want with it. Display it anywhere, change attribution, etc…. We all know that Google is collecting as much information as possible from users to so that they can present more relevant ads, but the above seems to be a step further. And how does this license work with the “incognito” mode?

I am sure Google would not get a court to uphold most of this but I do not want to foolishly assume that. Am i wrong here? Is my interpretation off? is this nothing new? Does Google already own me?

Someone fill me in.

Here is the Chrome Terms of Service (EULA). 
http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html

Here are some other posts floating around about this:

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/09/03/0247205.shtml

http://gizmodo.com/5044871/google-chrome-eula-claims-ownership-of-everything-you-create-on-chrome-from-blog-posts-to-emails

UPDATE: I just saw this post on cnet that look like the Google is already planning to modify the License.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10031703-56.html

UPDATE II: The EULA has already been updated. See it here
http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html