My Favorite Way to Track Global Metrics
Jun 2nd, 2007  by Pedro Sostre

Gregarious FeedFlare

Sure, keeping tabs on statistics for your own website is smart. But there has always been the desire to know how everyone else is doing. The desire to compete is ingrained in us. That desire has given birth to several companies whose mission it is to report on the global metrics, allowing us to identify trends and ’see how were doing’, in a sense.

Of course, no one could truly know how much traffic each site in the world is getting (perhaps Google has the best shot at that, but they aren’t sharing that information.) but there are a few companies whose efforts are worth noting.

My personal favorite is Compete. Founded by Bill Gross in 2000, Compete is the relative freshman in this field. Despite that, it’s my favorite of the group for several reasons. Here’s why, in no particular order:

• Bill Gross is the man.
  He is the founder of GoTo.com, the father of Pay-Per-Click search. Because of Bill, I have made lots of money. Thanks, Bill. The Internet marketing world owes you one.
• Compete is more transparent, and probably more thorough than others in the field.
  They have this handy little chart that breaks it down for us.
• They show people counts.
  While others display their data in terms of rankings and other obscure metrics, people counts are something I can quantify. These numbers aren’t always accurate, but still, I think its a move in the right direction.
• Their graphs are not reserved only for the big guys.
  If you try to compare the sites shown in the above graph in Alexa, you get a blank graph. That’s useful, right?
• They seem genuinely passionate about what they’re doing.
  Most people that know me, know that I value passion over many other qualities. Over experience, over skill, over intelligence. That because experienced, skilled, and intelligent people can do anything. Passionate people will do anything. They are the ones that take ideas to new levels. They are the ones that push passed obscurity and into real success and innovation.
  To validate my point, take a look at the blogs for both Compete and Alexa. My quick glance today (June 2, 2007) shows the recent posts for Compete using their analytics data to expound on topics like What effect does gas price have on consumers?, The Torso of the Internet (as opposed to the long tail), and User-Generated Video Goes to the Big Screen. And that’s just some of what they’ve posted in the past week. Alexa on the other hand looks like they update the blog about once or twice a month and what are they talking about? Alexa’s New Look, Alexa Data vs. Your Raw Logs, and Alexaholic/Statsaholic (A post about how they are suing some guy for starting a website called Alexaholic.com). They’re sitting on mountains of data, and this is all they can find to talk about? How sad is that? How are they going to innovate the global analytics industry when they are more concerned about their new look and suing some little guy for using your name in their domain name. Where is the passion!?

 

Despite my preference, Compete isn’t the only site I use. A few other notables include:

Alexa. I find that most people have heard of Alexa and have some clue about what an Alexa ranking is. Alexa gathers usage statistics through their toolbar and details for each site are available on Alexa.com. I use them to compare rankings for bigger sites and watch overall trends.

Hitwise. The Hitwise Data Center offers information on Top 20 Websites, Leading Search Engines, Top 10 Industry Search Terms, Industry Statistics, Top 4 Fast Moving Websites, and more. It’s a good indicator of seasonal trends in particular industries, but they dont make much long tail information available.

Nielsen//NetRatings. They provide some very general information free of charge to the public. What I find valueable are their Internet Advertising Metrics which reports on Leading Industry Advertisers, Top Site Genres, Most Popular Ad Sizes, and more.