Compete vs. Alexa and the Dangers of Toolbar Metrics
Relying on toolbar generated metrics such as Alexa to make important decisions can be very dangerous if you don’t ask yourself the single most important question of any data collection tool: What is the source of the data?
Yes it’s the toolbar, but ultimately who is using the toolbar? That is, who has actually gone and taken the time to install the toolbar widget. I would have to guess that people install the toolbar for one primary reason - to get metrics - and not for the secondary reason of supplying metrics.
And who is most interested in getting metrics? Internet marketers! SEO’s (like myself) usually have a variety of toolbars installed in order to evaluate markets and perform competitive analysis.
Guy Kawasaki recently interviewed the chief marketing officer and product manager of Compete, Inc. They discuss how Compete competes with Alexa and Comscore for measuring site traffic metrics across the web.
Most importantly, they use a large sample (2,000,000 users) and a diversity of data sources (more than 10 different data streams).
Personally I use Compete’s service and like it very much. I’ve compared their metrics to actual web analytics metrics from sites that I manage and the correlation is pretty good - much much better than Alexa. And now I feel even more confident knowing that they derive their data from multiple sources (10) other the toolbar widget. You can get the Compete toolbar here.
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