How often have you been looking for a travel deal, but you’ve been unsure at how trustworthy the site is? Is it some fly by night or one of the most popular destinations online? What if there was an easy way to tell? There is a way, but mostly just bloggers and tech folks use it. I love it so much though, I’m sharing it with you, even if that means you can now see my score (eek!).
No More Trying to Guess
Last spring, I had a PR person email me about a story that seemed too good to be true. Her client had 12 million copies of their electronic travel guides downloaded that year. And they expected a huge jump in 2010. Were online travel guides becoming so popular that some titles were beating out their print counterparts? I checked out the site, a company that was new to me and the first thing I did was look at their Alexa and Compete rankings on my toolbar.
Instantly, I knew the answer.
What the Toolbar Tells You
Most of the bloggers I know already have this installed. It’s a little toolbar that gives you the website ratings of the site you’re visiting, on the right hand bottom corner of your screen. Alexa ratings go up with #1 being the best. The higher the number the lower your traffic. Compete gives you the number of people who visit per month (higher is better) and a ranking (same as Alexa). Between these two numbers, it’s quickly tell approximately how popular a site is.
So when I visited the site, which supposedly had 12 million downloads but an Alexa and Compete ranking higher than my blog (higher ranking = lower traffic), I was able to do that math pretty quickly. I know I don’t get 1 million people to my site per month. Instead of a 250,000 ranking they should of had something under 25,000. This instantly raised a red flag for me, and I was able to ask the right questions before going further.
Installing the Toolbar
If you know me personally, I’ve probably already made you install it. My husband uses it. I tried to get my mom to install it last year. I’m generally not a big user of blogging tools that come out, but this one is truly so simple. You go to Alexa and Compete and download the toolbar. That’s it.
How to Use It
I’ll give you an example from this morning. I got an email from Roofswap.com about a new study they did on the most popular locations. Interesting. Maybe there’s an article in there or at least I could pass on the URL to folks looking to do the whole home exchange vacation thing. So I go to their site and immediately I look at my little toolbar on the bottom right hand side. This is what I see:
The first number is the Alexa rank. It’s over a million, which might be fine for a blog, but for a commercial site, tells me right away that the traffic is either extremely low or they are very new. The second area “People Count” is from Compete and they have no numbers for this site. That can mean they are too small to be picked up by Compete or again, they are new.
If I want more detail (and I did), I can just right click on the Alexa score and look at the Traffic tab for this site. This is what I see:
1. The rank is over 1 million
2. There is only one website linking in.
3. There is no data for beyond three months, meaning the site is very new.
Would all this make me ignore a potential site? Maybe not. But I’ll definitely look a little harder at what they are claiming. Would a study from the biggest home exchange website be worth more? Absolutely! They might have millions of users and that data can be very useful. For a brand new site with a trickle of traffic, I’m not sure where they get their data, but that’s the first question I’d ask.
What’s a Good Ranking?
At first the numbers might not mean much, I mean, who cares if you’re 100,000 or 1,000,000? Here are some popular sites, that might give you an idea of the relative weight.
Google
Kayak
Lonely Planet
World Hum
Brave New Traveler
Is it Accurate?
Nope. You can see even from the examples above that there big disagreements between Alexa and Compete. For example World Hum and Brave New Traveler both rank at about 50,000 for Alexa. But for Compete World Hum is much higher at 15,000 and Brave New Traveler is at 50,000. Why the difference? Both Alexa and Compete only count visits if you have the toolbar installed. This can skew the numbers wildly. But in general, if you have a site at 1 million, there isn’t much chance that they are actually a site as big as World Hum. (Note: tech sites tend to skew higher traffic, so if the subject is anything techie, adjust your expectations).
Other Tools
I asked Chris Brogan about this when last spring when I had that suspicious press release. He uses:
I’m sure if you asked 100 different bloggers, there would be 100 different tools. I like these because I don’t have to leave Firefox to see the scores. If you’ve got a better tool, feel free to post it in the comments.
Download:
In 2008, I quit my corporate job, sold off everything I owned and moved overseas with my husband Drew. Since then we've traveled around the world, started our careers over as creative types and nurtured our love of sleeping in late. Oh and we had a baby. Cole, our almost 2 year old has been traveling since he was four months old and probably knows more Thai than me (not that he brags).
