Quantcast provide real data because I am Quantified with their code embedded in every page

We can compare that data with Alexa

I have also had some incompatibility problems with a few users of Internet Explorer with some of the Javascript widgets, though the errors that seemed to be causing the problems have now been fixed.

However the problem doesn’t manifest just on this blog, it seems to be fairly universal on blogs in the same or similar niches, and as far as I am aware, none of these blogs have had a significant decline in real traffic.

Here are the stats for the following blogs:-

Problogger
Shoemoney
John Chow
DoshDosh
Daily Blog Tips

I took these screenshots a couple of weeks ago, though there doesn’t seem to be any significant change within the last 2 weeks..

The trend seems to be downward for all these sites, though as I have already started, I don’t believe any of them have a real decline in traffic.

So what could cause this?

I initially thought that it might be due to problems with the Search Status plugin for firefox, or the way Alexa support 3rd party Applications but the developers stated they hadn’t noticed any problems. It is true that occasionally I have problems with Alexa data displaying in Search Status, but currently I attribute this to a possible timeout of my poor internet connection (yeah it is still bad)
Does anyone else get a grey bar for Alexa a lot of the time?

It could also be some kind of manual adjustment, either for specific niches, or for data that comes from 3rd party applicaions which are predominantly used by webmasters. This would make a lot of sense because it is widely known that Alexa scores for various online marketing sites are much higher than their real traffic figures, and Firefox is generally popular among web developers.

Has anyone been monitoring similar data in other niches and noticed what may be a modification of the data? Examples of quantified sites would be very welcome to compare, especially if there are other sites in the same niche that are also quantified.

Oh and please, I am just going to flag as spam any comment questioning whether Alexa data has any value, and that might cause all previous comments to also be removed. Spam Karma has a great roll-back feature.

Did you notice that Alexa are again reporting reach using “millions” in the first Alexa screenshot?

Adage Power 150

Over the last few days for instance I noticed that Advertising Age have rejigged their Adage Power150 which I previously discussed a few months ago. It is great to see that Google PageRank has a lot less importance, and the inclusion of Yahoo link data, but there is an over reliance on Technorati.

Technorati is easily gamed, because they count links from the sidebar and footer, which can easily be encouraged by creating widgets and WordPress Themes. They do try to clean up their own Top 100 list, manually removing blogs that seem to have an overbearing number of links from viral content.
There are also some aspects of how a theme is designed that have a huge affect on how many links Technorati claim from a single blog, or the number of blogs that Technorati think are at a single domain.
Technorati currently accounts for 70 of the possible 150 total points a blog can receive, and the top ranking blogs can gain close to a full quota, unlike PageRank for which only 6 or 7 points can reasonably be attained.

You will notice that a lot of the Yahoo references show zero – values returned from an API need to be cached and discounted if they are zero, or return a number that is a significant change. I have seen Yahoo numbers drop from 30K links down to less than 9K, only for them to rebound.
It should also be noted that Yahoo also give credit for nofollow links from places like Delicious, Stumbleupon, and even blog comments. Not all links are created equal.

There is a bonus with the changes – I have gone from around 30 on the list to 17 or 18, and Adage is a low but consistent traffic source and has certainly extended my reach with new subscribers.

Top 100 Make Money Blogs

Another list that sends traffic daily is Mark’s, but again it suffers from a number of anomalies.

First of all PageRank plays a visible factor, or I am sure Yaro would be placed a few points higher, he used to be a PR6, and whilst it might not affect position so much, I have highlighed the other sites that currently have a penalty.

There also seems to be a problem with the Technorati rating on a number of blogs being much lower than it should be. I am not sure if this is a canonical domain problem, or some kind of new factor being applied to specific domains for data accessed by API.

Niches

Many niches don’t link out as much as meta blogging and technology blogs, and those in related niches such as venture capital.

As an example regular reader Lucia also has a knitting blog – I know that at times she gets 3 or 4 times as much traffic as me, even without social media influence.

PR3 (I remember it being a 4?), Technorati rank 44,000 (141 blog reactions), Alexa around 200K

The current statistical measures people use just don’t relate to the vast majority of bloggers.

Existing Stats Are Not Accurate?

Alexa is based upon toolbar usage – though their own toolbar isn’t very useful for many people, webmasters in the meta blogging niche can recommend the highly useful Search Status toolbar for Firefox that feeds Alexa with the same data.

Compete used to suffer from poor uptake of their Firefox toolbar because of problems with Firefox, but when Compete was added to the Search Status toolbar, again meta blogging and SEO blogs saw a boost.

With Technorati being used as a factor in so many monetization services, various methods have been used to boost links from other bloggers. Whilst they might get manually edited out of the top100 blogs on Technorati (and I have written how to avoid this several months ago), their numbers still get reported through the API though there is no guarantee that will last forever.

What would top bloggers do if the API for Technorati starts to report zero for anyone that Technorati feel is gaming the system?

Quantcast

Quantcast is accurate, but only if you include their tracking code on your blog and get “Quantified”

If you don’t, you end up claiming they are inaccurate in your end of year stats ;) – sorry Rand, I couldn’t resist that one.

If you compare our data and the SELand data to what Compete, Quantcast or Alexa are reporting, you can see how tragically inaccurate those services are. Sadly, that’s no anomally. Everytime I get access to a client’s visit data, I’m always curious to check the three and have not once found accuracy, even on a relative basis. Third party traffic metrics still have a very, very long way to go.

Just to give you an idea of what happens if you don’t add tracking code to get quantified, here is a comparison between this domain and DoshDosh, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land & SEOmoz.

note:the Quantcast images will display much clearer in a feed reader, they are limited on display width on the blog and forced to a smaller size

Search Engine Land traffic is directly measured, as is my own, the other sites are just a panel estimate. As SEL effectively makes the others almost invisible, lets replace SEL with Marketing Pilgrim

You can see some clear traffic spikes in the panel estimates, probably due to click traffic from other sites which have Quantcast code embedded such as Digg

In fact of the major social news and bookmarking sites, only Digg and Propeller are Quantified.

Why IzeaRanks IS Needed, But Might Be Rejected

When you create a page on a blog to help you sell your advertising inventory, how can an advertiser trust the traffic figures you give them, and why should they have to research whether you in some way gamed the statistics?

If you are a large publisher and it is a significant advertiser, you might be willing to give them access to some real statistics, such as Google Analytics through shared access, or your advertising administration system might provide reasonable stats to advertisers. As an example B5Media use Valueclick – I would hope Valueclick have some tools to provide statistics that can be verified before an advertiser makes a purchase.

Certainly Problogger isn’t listed as Quantified

For smaller publishers it would be possible for them to use existing services like Quantcast, but they don’t, because using Quantcast isn’t being encouraged by the people that count… the monetization services and advertisers.

For all the negative publicity Izea has had due to their PayPerPost service, one thing remains clear – they are an advertising company looking to help bloggers make money. They are not a competitor.

I would be more worried if I was placing tracking code on my blog if Izea in some way were a competitor creating content, such as Performancing with their Metrics service, which Izea themselves almost purchased though then it was a different animal, and not just a branded version of an existing tracking service.

I am a firm believer in not making things too easy for competitors, well with this blog I don’t care so much, but certainly for niche sites. I don’t worry too much about monetization services gaining stats, and I never looked on MyBlogLog having access being a problem. I am not sure if Blogcatalog are collecting anything, but again, they are not exactly running a blog network.

The IzeaRanks interface is honestly pretty basic compared to what is offered by Quantcast as far as raw traffic stats, and you are certainly missing all the segmentation data (though I am not sure how reliable that is).

Izea’s “RealRank” is based upon the following factors (from their announcement)

• 70% weighted towards visitors per day
• 20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
• 10% weighted towards pageviews per day

I am not sure whether Izea have come up with a way to have only “Real” pageviews and visitors counted, as many stats packages have problems with the pre-fetching of pages from Stumbleupon causing massive errors.

The active inbound links is an interesting statistic. Links that deliver real traffic. It is relatively easy to build up links and gain PageRank from obscure sites, or to game rankings with themes and widgets, but those links rarely get clicked on by visitors. Even blogrolls are pretty much ignored by visitors unless you have an unfair advantage of your sitename starting with the letter A ;)

Many people state that the value of RealRank will be based upon how many bloggers use it. That is partially true, but the real traffic and unique visitor values will be valuable to advertisers even if just one blogger signed up for the service.

I am disappointed that Izea are not doing anything with feeds, though it is much easier to do that with WordPress blogs than blogs on Blogspot, especially with the way Google have now integrated Blogger and Feedburner. The technical skill that would be needed to feed a feed into izea and back out to Feedburner would cause countless technical support problems, and Izea have enough technical support problems with some of their other services, and no end of headaches.

There is an API, I am sure some smart people will jump on it and use it to provide something useful, though I am not sure how quickly that will happen. The usage restrictions of 5000 calls per day is generous.

It is true that Google might currently look on javascript from Izea as an indication of writing paid posts, but hopefully with Social Spark that will be cleared up. Social Spark will offer total transparency. If you are doing nothing wrong, it probably isn’t going to be a major problem even if Google clock up even more false positives for a short while. If you are doing something naughty, you are probably going to be caught anyway.

Do You Have An Advertising Sales Page?

If you have an advertising sales page on your blog, have no doubt that advertisers will start to expect the availability of real statistics, not something you quote from AWStats.
AWStats typically reports around 6x as many page views compared to javascript based tracking on my blog, and quite a few more unique visitors.

You could include Quantcast, but you might as well include IzeaRank at the same time especially if some smart people come up with a way to present the stats effectively.
I can see Paul’s point at Mashable, that Izea maybe should have concentrated on the whole of the internet, and not just the blogosphere, but you could argue that the BBC or the Washington Post should be included in the Technorati Top100 as well, because they offer RSS feeds.

In my mind the individual rating of blogs by RealRank is meaningless unless it it put into context of their topical niche, such as I could compare Mashable with Techcrunch on Quantcast and discover that neither are quantified, so the statistics are totally worthless.

I can understand why Darren doesn’t necessarily need it, or other B5 Media Blogs, but many niche bloggers do need something they can use to demonstrate their relative worth. Just a week ago a key tip from Shoemoney on Darren’s blog was about a clear advertising page.

Is there a difference between clear and transparent/honest/uncoloured ?

How much creative license should people use to sell advertising?

There are multiple reasons why I have supported PayPerPost and similar programs so strongly, and yet at the same time have never reviewed a link buying / selling service.

I have mentioned link buying and selling in passing, and also a couple of WordPress plugins, but those plugins generally allow you to sell links which have a nofollow.

My emphasis both in editorial about services and in the few reviews I have myself written is to encourage the writing of quality content with editorial links. Compensation in whatever form should be based upon the time involved, expertise, and possibly the size and influence of the audience, and not based upon any SEO benefit to a site or service being reviewed.

Encouraging The Selling of PageRank?

It is my belief that I don’t advocate the selling of PageRank, especially considering how I also discourage excessive blogrolls and sitewide links. If you have links coming in for your every utterance, I suppose internal linking structure is less important to you than acknowledging sites you respect (who might also reciprocate), or possibly those you sell links to (if you do) but in general for niche marketing blogs I tend to avoid leaks in the sidebar.

Comments on Sphinn and even here in the comments recently suggest there is some kind of disconnect between how I regard paid review services, and possibly how they are regarded, used and abused by the SEO community at large, and possibly Google reacting to that attitude taken by SEOs and not that taken by the review services, or the reviewers themselves. I think it is important to point out that PayPerPost was created by a marketing company, not by an SEO or link selling company.

Rather than single out individuals for the comments they have made, I would rather answer a specific question asked here on my blog by Lisa Stewart

Hi Andy- thanks for the excellent and well thought out post and arguments FOR services like PayPerPost.

To play Gevil’s Advocate- If a site (like PPP) is offering a fee to post and the fee is based entirely on Page Rank (and sometimes Alexa traffic) then why can’t it be interpreted as paying for page rank?
A post coming from PPP on a PR3 site may cost advertiser 10.00 and the SAME post on PR5 is 50.00.

Why wouldn’t Google seeing this as gaming PR?

Now I should point out that at this time Google is interpreting this as gaming PageRank. I personally feel this is the wrong interpretation, but then my own interpretation could be extremely biased. I have been penalized by Google, even though I believe I don’t sell PageRank.

Advertiser Or Client Intent

Every potential client who has requested a review and I have considered for a review, when told that specific link text is not a possibility, and that any link I give would be for editorial purposes, has responded favourably.

It seems people are not necessarily ordering reviews for SEO purposes at all, though I do give SEO friendly links to things I highlight as part of the editorial process.

Many corporate advertisers have a different need to fulfil, that of creating a buzz about a new product and feel that blogs are an interesting avenue to explore. They will most likely get different feedback than they would from traditional reviews sites, because a reviewer whilst being a consumer, would also spend more time doing it.
In the attention age we live in, gaining feedback from consumers whilst increasingly vital, is also becoming increasingly more difficult – sure consumers might make a passing comment, but constructive feedback is less likely, unless they feel aggrieved.

Google, Microsoft, and even most startups have rank upon rank of staff members and shareholders to “get the message out” about a new product or service, but in many ways those too are paid reviews that don’t mention competing products or services.
Other large companies don’t have such an extensive and influential online presence amongst their staff and investors, thus they look to other alternatives.

• Internal PR – the largest firms retain their own public relations specialists, often with shared ties to advertising personel – this isn’t a cheap undertaking.
• PR Firms – expensive but have access to key influencers
• Press releases – wider distribution costs money, though they are less effective for companies that aren’t monitored continually, and information is less likely to trickle down to niche markets – I have seen a number of popular websites hosting paid press releases
• Focus groups – Google themselves pay $75 per hour for people to test their services, and are probably paying the person monitoring them even more – from this they gain private feedback, but I wonder how many people also write about the experience.
• Product sample giveaways – quite frequently these do not have to be given back, so a blog owner can keep them, or give them away to readers.
• Special events – I have attended special events by major Fortune 500 corporations launching products where many of the exhibitors (including me) had flight, room and board funded, along with display space, and the same was probably true of the press.
• Paid reviews and buzz marketing

For some reason there is a disconnect between paying a blogger $10 to $200 for a post, and paying a staff member $100 per hour to chase a group of bloggers to write something for free, feed them with drinks, sponsor their events etc.

Social media optimization might be looked on as successful if a $5000 budget garnered 50 to 100 links, but paid reviews can garner many more links for a similar budget, and could also be used in conjunction with a social media campaign.

Paid blogging is a way of grabbing the attention of a blogger to consider looking at a product or service and sharing their experiences about it in public.

There are obviously some companies that use it specifically for SEO purposes, and some bloggers who are willing to write something purely for SEO purposes. Then again have you never heard of “SEO press releases” and “Article Marketing” where the content is provided 100% with links just to copy and paste.

I don’t think Hewlett Packard, Ford, or major movie studios really care that much about whether links count for search engines, but they probably do care if links are clicked. If you use nofollow, to a percentage of readers who see the link, the fact that you use nofollow suggests that you don’t trust the service you are writing about, the intent of nofollow.
The same is true for any redirects which suggest affiliate links and commercial tracking.

It is quite possible that 30% of my readers, and possibly more than 50% of my regular readers can see when I have used a nofollow on a link, because I encourage them to use the Search Status plugin for Firefox.

When Google and Microsoft employees start linking to their employers using nofollow, that is when I will start using nofollow on paid reviews and linking to consulting clients.

Leading People Astray

It has been suggested that my coverage of PayPerPost, Paid Reviews, and PageRank is in some way leading people astray, and thus the “Pied Piper” connotation.

My firm belief is that my readership is extremely mature and intelligent, and quite capable of making their own informed decisions.

Many do sell advertising in various ways without the nofollow attribute value, and would choose to use that advertising or not without my intervention, as they chose to use it in the first place without my input.

When half your family income comes from a few links in the sidebar on a few blogs, it is a very difficult decision to remove them just before Christmas, especially if you have long-term contracts.

If I was to denounce PayPerPost, it would have very little effect on the decision process each would make as an individual.

Alternative Metrics For Authority

There is a pay scale in many aspects of every day life, the time of different people has a different perceived value.

Advertisers, companies doing market research, and those looking for a little consulting need some way to determine a suitable pay scale.

• Traffic metrics

  Alexa and Compete are not very relative to niches, and not enough people install Quantcast code on their site to get a real measure.

• Technorati

  easily gamed with WordPress themes and widgets – eventually Technorati do kick sites out of the Top100 but the APis will still send high ratings. Competitions and “review my blog” have also been looked on as a good way of boosting Technorati rankings, and then we shouldn’t forget memes and link chains.
  Technorati really need to move away from counting anything in a sidebar, including blogroll links.

• Feedburner Subscribers

  You would hope that this would be accurate, but due to the problems with default feed packages, and cross promotions of alternative reading platforms, the real number of subscribers could be anything from 30% to 90% of the number shown… and of course that doesn’t mean that people even open their feed reader.

• Comments

  How much can your blog actually stimulate discussion on other blogs, and in your own comments. This is a measure of influence.

• Clicks From Feeds

  Lots of people subscribe to content but don’t read it, or take action by clicking through to an article or referenced site. Feedburner do offer some tracking, but it is hard to use this as an external metric, and to get good results you have to use their tracking URLs which then reduce the numbers of links counted by other metrics such as Technorati. People make linking mistakes.

• Social News & Bookmarking

  Most sites provide some kind of API access, thus allowing you to judge the quality of a page based upon social factors and popularity. These are also gamed to a certain extent. Stumbleupon need to provide an API. Eventually something like the Social Media for Firefox extension might be looked on as more useful than other metrics.

• Meme Trackers

  Meme trackers try to track what is a hot story right now, such as Techmeme and Megite. The nearest thing they provide to an overall measure of influence are compilations of statistics such as the Techmeme Leaderboard. It is a very small subset of sites.

• Custom Metrics

  Scripts such as Blogstorm can give an indication of popularity, but require server side access, and for a blog owner to care about being listed.

• PageRank

  Proving to be too easily gamed (WordPress themes and funny redirects), and the visual representation provided in the Google toolbar is now being adjusted with manual PageRank penalties with arguably commercial considerations. It hasn’t been very meaningful for search results for some time, and now it is no longer a metric of social influence by anyone that understand these things. Unfortunately Google mislead their Google Toolbar users.



• Argus Is Coming

  I am excited about the potential of whatever Izea (PayPerPost) come up with for their Argus project which promised to provide a comprehensive metrics service for both bloggers and advertisers.

  I haven’t seen it, am not on the alpha test, and might not get early access to it because I am not going to be at Postiecon or Blog World Expo.

Examples Of PageRank Used For Ranking

The Google Directory
The Adage Power 150
The Top 25 Blogs About Blogging
The Top 100 Make Money Onine Blogs

The of course there is the PayPerPost Direct – it is an advertiser marketplace and PageRank is used as one of the indicators of authority or influence, but you can’t search the database based upon that field, and it is just one metric offered and soon to be removed.

It is quite possible Google just took that database of sites for its penalty list, without realising that whilst PageRank is used as an indication of authority, bloggers are free to set their own criteria in private discussion with someone requiring some kind of review service. Bloggers are quite able to specify that they will nofollow the links, or use redirects. they are also able (as I do) to insist that all links are editorial..

I know bloggers on that list who have never written a review for PayPerPost.

Techcrunch Crunchies

In closing, Techcrunch along with a number of other technology blogs will soon launch what appears to be an award ceremony for technology startups.
If there happens to be a monetization or blogging category, I know who I am going to nominate, and encourage people to vote for.
In something as serious as an award called “The Crunchies”, I am quite happy to try to influence any results.

Update

I just want to highlight why I don’t support paid links and this is the kind of review I really wish Sebastian had been paid for.

If Sebastian was giving that type of advice in private, it would probably cost someone $1000 or more… seriously, Sebastian knows his stuff, just as he demonstrated with the Blogcatalog redirect problems in the past.

But whilst we await an advertising metric which can’t be gamed, there is certainly one measurable benefit of having a good Alexa score, or more importantly a significant gain in Alexa rating.

Alexa Can Drive Real Qualified Traffic

But where from? The Top 10 Movers and Shakers page.

Due to the sudden influx in traffic over the last week due to the Google PageRank updates, I was shocked to see some referral traffic coming from Alexa.

Here is a screenshot for some future bragroll or for use as “social proof”.

Here is my traffic spike that demonstrates that 390% increase in traffic as measured by Alexa.

Alexa Accuracy

Here is the amazing part of all this, though obviously the traffic interested in my PageRank articles is probably similar in nature to my normal traffic (using the Search Status plugin for Firefox)

390% Increase Is Fairly Accurate

The peak traffic on 24th October represented 4,093 unique visitors (24hr tracked by MBL) and 6,901 page views. Awstats shows 7674 visits and 66630 page views – the first figure is a lot more accurate.

Traffic actually has grown fairly slowly since February or March whichever metric I use, other than the one that probably counts the most, subscribers.

You will notice that that subscriber growth doesn’t contain any significant spikes. The growth isn’t based upon massive social media traffic such as a front page Digg as this blog has never appeared there, and probably never will.

I will have some more stats about the “PageRank Blogstorm” in due course.

So How Much Traffic Can You Gain From Alexa?

Note I am at the bottom of the list, so the traffic I will receive is much lower than those further up.

So far since I appeared on the list yesterday I have received 110 visitors, and those visitors know what the site is about which they are clicking on. Targeted Visitors

If that listing remains for a week (I don’t know how long they normally last), then I might gain 300+ visitors.

300 visitors might not seem like a lot, in the past I have managed to send 400 to someone’s blog, but in the general scale of things in this niche it isn’t bad for a single source of targeted traffic (discounting social sites), though temporary.

SEO Basics and Alexa Rank Mistakes

He has put in some extra effort and created some high quality pictures to describe what he is talking about. We have a rival for Rand Fishkin’s Googlebot in the making…

Whilst Youtube and Myspace don’t seem to consider the content of the video NSFW, I have taken the opportunity to mask certain references.
No pictorial content would be looked on as NSFW in most countries I am aware of, but there is certainly some female flesh shown from below the neckline.

It should be noted that this was intended at least in part to be a viral marketing campaign for Good Magazine, but there has been an evident boost in traffic in other directions.

• Front Page on Myspace



• Massive YouTube Hit



• Who Am I? (Personal Branding)



• Vital Statistics


Note: these were from before the video

• Billboard

It is important to place advertising on prime real estate, and in the case of a URL, in a clearly visible location just begging or tempting you to visit.



Traffic Rising To The Occasion



It is important to realise that those aren’t just webmaster visits, so compared to many top seo, marketing or blogging sites, those traffic numbers from Alexa are probably a lot higher.
On a one month chart, all you see is a vertical line.

I am not going to link to the video, if you want to watch it, (for statistics and facts about this particular industry) it is very easy to find.

Tags: alexa, marketing, myspace, nsfw, porn, sex, video, viral marketing, youtube
]]> http://andybeard.eu/740/how-to-launch-a-nsfw-site-on-mainstream-video-sites.html/feed 16 http://andybeard.eu/455/compete-toolbar-bug-with-google-reader-compete-vs-alexa-stats.html http://andybeard.eu/455/compete-toolbar-bug-with-google-reader-compete-vs-alexa-stats.html#comments Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:20:20 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/compete-toolbar-bug-with-google-reader-compete-vs-alexa-stats.html I have had long term problems with the Compete Toolbar as I pointed out some time ago on my friend Paul’s blog, I think I actually made that comment on my first visit to his blog.

Read more on Compete Toolbar Bug With Google Reader – Compete vs Alexa vs Quantcast Stats…

Tags: alexa, compete, firefox, google reader, quantcast, statistics, stats, toolbar
]]> I have had long term problems with the Compete Toolbar as I pointed out some time ago on my friend Paul’s blog, I think I actually made that comment on my first visit to his blog.

The only time I actually test the Compete Toolbar is when I get an upgrade for it. Firefox detects a new upgrade, downloads it, and switches the toolbar on automatically from its default state on my computer – off.

The reason I keep it switched off is because with the Compete Toolbar switched on, Google Reader doesn’t work. It has been a good 3 months since Paul noted a problem. I just downloaded a new version, and again it doesn’t work with Google Reader on my system.

Compete Statistics

I have been disappointed with Compete Statistics for some time, especially within various niches that are technology related.

I decided to do a little roundup of blogs in the SEO SEM & Make Money Niche – no disrespect to anyone I missed out, page load time is going to suck anyway with all these images. Some sites I checked out and they fell into line with others which have similar Alexa traffic, so I just kept one example.

Problogger.net

Current Alexa Rating:- 2309





Shoemoney.com

Current Alexa Rating:- 1281





Graywolf

Current Alexa Rating:- 4993





Pronet Advertising

Current Alexa Rating:- 10015





Search Engine Journal

Current Alexa Rating:- 4264





John Battelle’s Search Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7684





Search Engine Watch

Current Alexa Rating:- 957





TopRank Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7610





Andy Beard

Current Alexa Rating:- 32K going on 20k





Statistics Analysis

The Alexa stats just don’t tie up with the Compete stats, even in a similar niche. Why do SEJ and SEW do so much better than Problogger and Shoemoney on Compete scores when both have very high (and legitimate) Alexa scores?
John Battelle stats are fascinating – he has a huge number of subscribers based on his recent stats from a few days ago after Google Reader was included but his Alexa score and number of comments doesn’t match. John seems to have a different kind of reader.

Do corporate intranets and default feeds on start pages (before you sign up) get somehow added to subscriber data?

I have always looked on the number of comments as being a good indication for blogs as to whether Alexa data is consistant, and generally within this niche it is, with the exception of John Battelles stats. I can think of reasons for that, as he is a “trusted” news source.

It should also be noted that Compete is a relatively new service, younger than all of the sites listed. I didn’t include SearchEngineLand specifically because it is a new site and thus might not have been a fair comparison.

As for my own data… wow, I am in the top 1 million now for Compete.

I feel much more inclined to use Alexa data as an indicator over Compete, not only because I can actually use it without breaking Google Reader, but also because the statistics for Alexa at least seem to have some level of consistency.

Time to close Firefox to switch Compete off again until the next update.

Update: I have now added Quantcast figures

Quantcast

Quantcast is a strange entity, in that the figures for traffic can be highly accurate. I know the figures they have for my site are 100% accurate. The reason they have exact data for my site is because I have been running their tracking code on my site for the last month and have my site registered with them.

For sites that aren’t registered and running the tracking code, the data is fairly weak – I am not sure where they get the data from, but it seems to be fairly dubious.

Its another piece of code you end up placing in the footer of your site, and I am sure the tin-foil hat brigade are not too happy about sharing everything about their sites, but it seems Quantcast get the data even if you don’t use their tracking code. It is probably best to register and then decide which data to display.
Lots of data isn’t always displayed for lower ranked sites – that certainly seems to be the case with this site.

From the Quantcast FAQ

How can I fix my site profile?

There is a sure-fire way to improve the accuracy of these numbers: by placing a measurement pixel on your site. Add a pixel and let our technology do the rest. Within just a few days you’ll see more refined, accurate and representative numbers for your site’s audience.

How accurate their ratings are for sites that experience a growth in traffic are unknown, and the drops in reported traffic on some sites are strange. Where you host seems to make a difference with how much data they have if you don’t have the code installed.

Update2: Conversion Rater has been doing a similar analysis trying to create a rankings table based on this data. Unfortunately it isn’t taking into account why some of the metrics data might be totally inaccurate, such as sites not registered with Quantcast.
Clarification: Pat does mention screwy data for sites not including Quantcast code, but the way he says it suggests that this is affecting those on his list that have a 15,000,000 rating. Of the 16 sites on the list, only 4 might have registered with Quantcast. It is just not worth using the figure. Comepete seems to be all over the place as well, with 6 sites not having any data at all.

Tags: alexa, compete, firefox, google reader, quantcast, statistics, stats, toolbar
]]> http://andybeard.eu/455/compete-toolbar-bug-with-google-reader-compete-vs-alexa-stats.html/feed 9 http://andybeard.eu/435/alexa-finally-provide-some-useful-data.html http://andybeard.eu/435/alexa-finally-provide-some-useful-data.html#comments Sat, 17 Feb 2007 04:01:35 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/alexa-finally-provide-some-useful-data.html Ok that is a bit tongue in cheek – Alexa data has always had some use for sites that are not gamed, and within similar niches, and it is always nice to see.

Read more on Alexa Finally Provide Some Useful Data…

Tags: alexa, statistics, stats
]]> Ok that is a bit tongue in cheek – Alexa data has always had some use for sites that are not gamed, and within similar niches, and it is always nice to see.

To save me writing more about it, you can head over to Meg’s Blogpond report on new Alexa data.

There is a good reason I am sending you to Meg’s blog – she lives in Australia, and runs sites for an Aussie audience – the country data shows one of her sites is rated 176 in Australia – you would never tell that looking at the normal Alexa rating of around 25k

If you look at my own Alexa data, you will notice I am not gaming my results too much though I am using search status while editing, saving etc which has a small effect. 5% Polish traffic is likely at least 50% me, though I do have a few Polish readers.

Tags: alexa, statistics, stats
]]> http://andybeard.eu/435/alexa-finally-provide-some-useful-data.html/feed 1 http://andybeard.eu/195/pixelotto-failing.html http://andybeard.eu/195/pixelotto-failing.html#comments Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:10:18 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/pixelotto-failing.html Pixelotto, the follow-up by Alex Tew to his MillionDollarHomePage.com success is now one month old, and facing rapid decline rather than explosive or even sustained growth.



When announced, Techcrunch were not too hot on the new site.

Mathew Ingram also posted on the subject calling it a tax on the stupid.

Here is what I commented 1 month ago on Mathew’s blog

Hi Mathew

I believe this one will sell out faster than the original and he will make a huge amount more money on this.

The reason website owners buy the pixels is because they want traffic, and maybe a backlink from the site.

The lotto is legal, because the winners are not having to pay for a ticket, they are just visitors who click on adverts, visit sites, and probably have to read the site for a certain number of seconds before they “earn” their lotto prize entry.

Lots of traffic exchange programs work on a similar manual clicking system.

He also has a nice backend… email addresses from subscriptions. I am sure he will be able to use that to promote anything he likes in the future, and to drive additional traffic back to the site over the coming months.

That incentive to click is going to to mean a many fold increase in traffic over the previous incarnation, and I haven’t heard of many complaints about his first effort.

This site is a true next generation of the same idea, unlike many of the copycat sites based on selling pixels, words etc.

I think this time around the advertising will be much better organised, and there will be some much larger players involved from day one.

Analysis of MillionDollarHomepage

Here is the current status. As is easy to judge, it was a massive success, driven heavily by word-of-mouth “grass roots” advertising, with some professional PR at later stages to ensure continued momentum.



Lets have a look at some Alexa data (yes I know it isn’t 100% reliable, but these sites are set up in similar ways with similar traffic sources)

There was only a slow decline in traffic over a number of months, with a significant 2nd major traffic spike when mainstream press got hold of the story.

Pixelotto Analysis

Just 1 month old, but lets look at the Alexa data.

In this case it is a 3 month graph to show more detail.

Lets look at the 2 sites side-by-side

There was a similar initial launch peak, but the traffic has been slowing down far more rapidly, with far fewer people talking about it.

There has also been quite a slow uptake in advertising purchases. At launch (from memory) Pixeloto attained approximately $100,000 worth of advertising. During the following month, only an additional $50,000 have been added to the money pool.

Pixelotto Design Flawed?

I don’t think there are any problems with the overall business model. I stand by what I stated in my initial comments. This site should be viable, the problem lies somewhere else.

Pixelotto Business Implementation Flawed?

It is not just how good an idea is, but how well you execute it.

1. Was the launch too close to Christmas to attract press interest?
2. Alex has a large pool of money to use for promoting his new offering, but doesn’t seem to be using it. He has just relied on free press based on his previous success. He should be spending more money not less. It isn’t as newsworthy this time around.
3. Previously there was a story, with a blog. This time around no blog in sight
4. The mailing list – Alex is building a mailing list, which could be the engine for current and future promotion – a mailing list is useless if you don’t use it
5. Success breeds success sometimes, but if the current venture is not showing legs, it could die very fast. It is necessary to stimulate the success so it becomes newsworthy

Links & Backlinks

Another gauge of success, and ultimately how attractive the site is for advertising.

Links are what bring in the traffic, and what might provide some level of additional search engine benefit.

The following screen shots are taken from MSN Live Search, as they tend to show more links than other services currently.

MillionDollarHomePage was very successful in gaining lots of links from high quality sites.



Pixelotto has gained high quality links, but not very many. I doubt this will represent more than PR5 in the next Google update.



Blogosphere

Blog marketing was certainly one avenue for traffic that Pixelotto should be exploiting better than previously. It isn’t happening.
Here are some current charts for

MillionDollarHomePage:- Source Technorati



Pixelotto:- Source Technorati



What seems amazing is that MillionDollarHomePage seems to still be gaining more blog attention than Pixelotto.

How to Fix Pixelotto

Alex needs to get his finger out and promote the hell out of Pixelotto. He is sure to have some change left over from his previous venture. It is time to leverage all that he learned previously, use press releases extensively and get his PR agency earning their pay checks.
If it costs him a few 100K to make the site a success, it is still a good business. He can’t expect 1000% profit margin this time around, at least until Pixelotto has cycled though once and has a massive mailing list to drive future cycles.
A radical step would be to allocate the first $1,000,000 to prizes rather than to the pocket of Alex.
An additional step would be a custom email system which reminded viewers of the site every 2 days (to get more chance of winning) suggesting sites to visit.
Without press coverage, advertisers are not going to invest and Pixelotto will never achieve the success of its predecessor.

Tags: Alex Tew, alexa, email marketing, markeing, membership site, million dollar home page, milliondollarhomepage, msn, pixel advertising, pixelotto, tech, traffic, viral list building, viral marketing, web 2.0
]]> http://andybeard.eu/195/pixelotto-failing.html/feed 10 http://andybeard.eu/151/tagging-and-traffic-analysis.html http://andybeard.eu/151/tagging-and-traffic-analysis.html#comments Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:03:32 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2006/12/tagging-and-traffic-analysis.html It is Friday, but I am still going to nag people about SEO and tagging.

It seems in the last 24 hrs that Alexa have caught up a little with their statistics

Read more on Tagging and traffic analysis…

Tags: alexa, blogging tips, Google Results, search engine optimization, search engines, SEO Blog, tagging, tags, utw, website traffic
]]> It is Friday, but I am still going to nag people about SEO and tagging.

It seems in the last 24 hrs that Alexa have caught up a little with their statistics

Am I gaming Alexa?

Nope, although I do use the Search Status plugin for Firefox, so some of my own views are counting as traffic most probably, but I am only one unique visitor.

So where has my traffic been coming from?

Well over the last few days I have had a fair amount of traffic from Quadszilla.

Quadszilla is becoming less “insular” with his blogging too, and put together a great “community post” of The best SEO articles of 2006. If you enjoy some of the posts, it is well worth a digg.

I have one of my posts listed there, quite near the top of the list.

This week that post has accounted for around 20% of my traffic.

It is hard to quantify my traffic gain from MyBlogLog. I can see the direct clicks through, but I can’t see the effect of repeat visits.
One of the things MyBlogLog doesn’t track is repeat traffic, but it is good to see some instant stats.
Lets say MyBlogLog gave me 10%

I post quite a few comments on other blogs. These might give me the occasional 2 or 3 visitors, or backlink. Maybe another 10%

The same is true for forum posts in various places. Another 10%

I gained 5% from StumbleUpon

It is hard to put an exact traffic figure on subscribers, but currently on a daily basis subscribers account for 20 to 40% of my traffic – thanks for subscribing guys.
My subscriber count in Feedburner is increasing, although lots of people are using Google Reader, and those subscriptions are not trackable.

The Quadszilla and StumbleUpon traffic was not a daily occurance, and the same could be said about traffic from Robert Scoble and the WordPress Trademark problem earlier in the month.

More than 20% of my traffic is coming from search

Some of that is blog search on Google and Technorati
Some of it is for fairly long tail terms

But most of it is for TAG PAGES

These are my own tag pages, not the tags that Technorati detects on my posts.

Read more about tag pages and seo

I am looking into ways to make my traffic stats public. My stats will give away all these hot longtail niche terms I keep pulling in traffic for, and I will be able to show how the traffic is appearng for various niche terms.

Tags: alexa, blogging tips, Google Results, search engine optimization, search engines, SEO Blog, tagging, tags, utw, website traffic
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