Web Analytics and Optimization Blog

Want to See How This Site is Doing?

I thought that I’d take some time with this post to showcase some of the tools out there for comparing your results competitively.

Some of you may or may not know that I have Quantcast’s tracking tags on the site in addition to Google Analytics (check out to see how I’m doing). I love the idea of Quantcast where they provide a similar service to comScore, but instead leave it to site publishers like myself to optionally have their site Quantified. Having your site Quantified means adding a tag (very similar to the Google Analytics tag) so that instead of panelist data being used to evaluate your site, you’re actually measuring real traffic.

Why is this important? Because panel based data is an estimation and estimations can be way off. With a panel I’m measuring the traffic of a single visitor and seeing where they go and what they do. While this data is still incredibly valuable, it generally isn’t incredibly accurate to estimate the total traffic to your site based on a number of visitors who may or may not have even visited your site!

By placing a tag on your site however, you’re actually collecting real data of your real visitors, not estimating. The result? Way more accurate information that people like advertisers use to collect information. Also, by using the same technological approach to track visitors both internally (Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, etc) and externally (Quantcast) you can stop your data comparison headaches when things aren’t adding up. Imagine a day when you don’t have to graph your internal analytics data versus what you’re using to evaluate yourself on the market?

But Quantcast Doesn’t Let Me Compare Sites!

Good point! Although I do love Quantcast, it doesn’t easily let you do comparisons (no Excel dumps, csvs, tsvs or whateverelse-vs). And when you’re in the business of competitive analysis, you’ll need a tool that suffices.

Most people immediately think comScore when they hear something like that, but believe it or not, there are alternatives to comScore and one of them being another fave of mine: compete.com. Now before anyone yells at me, yes compete.com collects its data the same way that comScore does, it’s all panel-based. So why, after my rant above am I even recommending this? Because compete.com is completely free!

Even if the data is a little off, anyone has to admit that being able to do comparisons on the fly for most major sites on the net is enough to make any analysts’ mouth water. And let’s be honest, the fact that I didn’t have to pay a dime to see that Microsoft.com is kicking Apple.com’s butt, is pretty cool.

What about Blogs?

For those of you who author a blog like I do, Technorati is also another great site for some competitive intelligence. For example, my site doesn’t nearly have the same level of authority that Avinash’s site, Occam’s Razor does…yet . I’ll let Technorati explain the actual metrics it uses and how it justifies their ranking system (a topic that’s largely in debate right now).

I hope that at least gives people a few ideas they perhaps hadn’t thought of before for how to go about getting an edge on their competition.

By the way, standby in the days to come for a very cool tool that should help you Google Analytics users out there!