Online Detective Work: A Trick Anyone Can Use
27. Oct, 2009 
21 Comments
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:
- Website Grader – http://www.websitegrader.com
- Technorati – http://www.technorati.com
- Compete – http://www.compete.com
Download:
I have a friend that used to work for both Alexa and Compete. It has been a while since he worked there, but he told me a bit about how they work.
Compete does not use the toolbar as their only source of data. Compete extrapolates data based on log files from ISP’s and other sources. They look at what the anonymous traffic patterns are then compare them to known sources of traffic.
Alexa has been moving to more data extrapolation, they have traditionally only used the toolbar. They have been making adjustments over the last 2 years because it would always overestimate tech related sites.
Both sites are pretty inaccurate with sites with low levels of traffic. Sites with low traffic are in a position where a few people can mean a large percentage change in traffic. For all practical purposes there is no difference between a site with a ranking of 300,000 and 1,000,000. If you read the Alexa site, even they will not vouch for the accuracy of any site ranked over 100,000. Once you get below 100k, they become more accurate as the law of large numbers kicks in. Once you get into the low tens of thousands, it is pretty accurate.
The other big difference between the two is that Alexa is a three month running average. Compete is done on a month by month basis. If you get a big traffic surge, it will take a month to show up on Compete and it will be diluted by the other 3 months of traffic on Alexa.
Gary Arndt´s last blog ..Daily Travel Photo – Olympic National Park, Washington
Thanks Gary!
I think that helps illustrate better what I was trying to show… the score isn’t accurate, but if a site has over 1 million ranking, then we’re talking about a pretty small amount of traffic. For a commercial site that should be a big red flag (really anything over 100,000 makes me raise an eyebrow).
Hi Christine,
Very valuable post for me. I had been meaning to download something but never got round to it, now I have.
Time to spy on all my other bloggers and mates websites….mwhahahaha. (Strokes white persian cat on lap)
Thanks again.
Jonny | thelifething.com´s last blog ..Cubical With A View: The Office Of A Traveling Entrepreneur On Holiday
I agree with Christine. I use Compete and Alexa both for analysis; because my websites that I analyze have a great amount of traffic and are under 30,000 rankings. But One may however use these statistics (though figures might not be accurate) to monitor the Site’s progress periodically from baseline.
Well this was an extremely helpful post for me. I get so bogged down by all the tech tools that I never know which ones to use. I will check out both Alexa and Compete.
Fly Girl´s last blog ..Partying with the Mocko Jumbies
This post was really helpful. I tend to use both Alexa and Compete, but I should really just download the toolbar. Plus, I always forget the meaning of each ranking.
Also, I just started using Hubspot’s website grader (they have blog grader, twitter grader, Facebook grader, and the list goes on). I am absolutely in love with it because it compiles all of the different tools in one place.
Susan´s last blog ..lucy the elephant
I just downloaded Compete. Never used it before. Thanks for all this useful, helpful information. Much appreciated!
And Gary’s comment definitely adds to the post.
Erica´s last blog ..Why I Love the Sun, the Clouds, the Sky, Sunrises & Sunsets
This is such a great resource Christine. I’ve never even heard of such a toolbar, but it looks incredibly useful. Thanks!
Nancy´s last blog ..Photo Essay: A Day in Portland, Oregon
We’re in the business of doing online research all the time. Travelers nominate their favorite places on our site, and we have to determine if there is a consensus out there that a certain hotel is truly amazing. We have the Alexa toolbar, but it isn’t that helpful for us with this kind of research. We’re often looking for information about very small, independently owned places – so we look elsewhere, like Flcker, YouTube, Trip Advisor, Boo, Lonely Planet, forums, etc… The list goes on!
Thanks so much for this I usually just book holidays online so its great to know whats trustworthy and whats not.
Wow – Thanks for these great resources! Downloading them now…
Nora Dunn´s last blog ..Our Backyard
Travel Tour India
i am really thankful for these advance and useful ideas.my best wishes for you
Firstly I’ve love to know who is claiming 12 million travel guide downloads annually LOL!
Another tool worth using is Google Adplanner — while it is designed with, well, ad planners in mind, for general competitor, ahh I mean site analysis, it can be very useful.
In the case of Travelfish, and as per Gary, both Alexa and Compete are in the right ballpark. That said,I know others with travel sites doing 5-10 times the traffic I do who maintain steadfastly that the trends in Compete and Alexa are way way off the mark. So they’re either in denial or the above mentioned packages can be very hit and miss.
Cheers
Hi All!
These are great resources that generally all use!
Compete is a good tool but more analytical idea would be when you subscribe for that tool.
If you have enough in your pocket and want to go into great depth of analysis, I also suggest Hitwise that provides great information and analysis on your traffic/ ROI/ etc.
I’d like to reemphasize the point Gary made about Alexa’s potential inaccuracy above the 100,000 mark. I’ve seen blogs that I know get lots of traffic with a 2 million rank, when sites with less traffic get a 1 million rank. I think the pool of Alexa toolbar users becomes statistically problematic with smaller sites.
Darn good–
Can you give us an example? Also what do you mean by “lots”? I’ve personally never seen it, so I’m curious.
Ok. Here’s an example. A friend of mine runs a “dad” blog at http://poopandboogies.blogspot.com/. I won’t reveal his traffic, because that isn’t my place… but I will say he averages 15-30 comments per post, which in my experience shows a healthy readership. This post on your site, for example, has 16 comments..
His current Alexa ranking is 2,607,644. That’s absurd to me.
Darngooddigs-
Ok, so you didn’t mention what “healthy readership”. Basically to me, if I’m trying to figure out if a site has significant traffic, it doesn’t really matter if they have 100 people a day or 1000, those are both relatively low numbers.
So if we do a little more snooping to that blog you mentioned, we can see that yes they have comments, but comments don’t actually represent traffic. There are hugely popular sites like gadling.com or jaunted.com who frequently get zero comments on a post. Even on my site, where my traffic has exponentially increased since I first started, doesn’t get more comments than I did in my first few months. Back then I had 100 people visiting a day but I’d get 10-20 comments on a post because I was commenting on everyone else’s blogs. Now I can have 100X that traffic on a given day and only get 5 comments.
Also you’ll notice that he isn’t stumbled on his last post and his front page only has one review. So it’s not likely that he’s getting social media traffic– the bread and butter of any big site.
Ultimately I think it comes down to your perspective of ‘healthy’. If I’m researching a site to see if I should buy something from them, I want them to have a good amount of traffic. Having an alexa rating over 1 million, while it could very rarely mean you get maybe 500 people a day, it usually means much less. My food blog gets about 10-25 people a day and has a ranking of 1.5 million. My husband’s personal blog gets the same and has a ranking of 1.8 million. One week I have 100 people per day and my average for that week was 400K.
Alexa isn’t perfect, but I still don’t think I’ll be buying stuff from a place with over 1 million– which is really the point of this post.
Christine,
Fair enough. And I would agree that Alexa, along with Compete, and the other tools can give someone a ballpark estimate of readership – especially when you get to the higher rankings, away from the 1 million up zone – which was also your point.
- Michael
I wouldn’t take Alexa seriously as can neither I neither my friends using these toolbars. Although I am checking some sites on alexa.com, but mostly to see backlinks not the rating. It looks like techies are biggest crowd using these toolbars, so you should be very careful to judge sites by alexa rating.
Vi @ Travel Tips´s last blog ..Whale watching Sydney: 2009 season whale sightings update
I dutifully downloaded both tool bars in November when I commented last, and I didn’t realize just how much I used them until I found myself surfing on somebody else’s computer, wondering how old the site on my screen was and what their basic stats were.
Everybody online claims to be the world’s greatest expert at something; it’s nice to use these tools to see who’s had how much time in the saddle, how many people listen to them, and how influential they are.
Even if Alexa and such isn’t perfect, it is a great general barometer…thanks for the tips!
Nora – The Professional Hobo´s last blog ..While I Travel, Do I Sell my House, or Rent it Out? (Reader Questions Answered)