Saturday, October 11, 2008

Competing for better web metrics

We have posted before (the last time just over a year ago) on the inadequacies of available web metrics for B2B sites. We publish a regular report as part of the BSG Asia Business Media Tracker subscription service which is based mainly on Alexa data. Some of readers and clients don't tire from pointing out to us the inadequacies of that.

So, I was interested this morning to come across a piece on Australia's TechNation site which gives traffic numbers for Aussie start-up sites. That's interesting in itself, but what caught my eye was that are using both Alexa numbers and those from compete.com. Call me ignorant if you will, but I wasn't aware of this one. I ran a test on numbers for Alibaba.com, Global Sources and made-in-china.com. I've always been a bit suspicious of the Alexa numbers for the latter. See what you make of the result:




I haven't looked into this seriously yet to work out where they get their numbers from. Have any of you? What comments to you have on Compete?
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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous11:16 pm

    Compete.com collects data via its toolbar installation at the browser end. Alexa and Google all do the same. Google also collects data through Google Analytics when the website owners who have opted to share their data in an anonymous form.

    Large advertising networks will also share data with the online analytic companies. You may want to take a look at Quantcast. They offer some good interesting data sources for web traffic and audience demographic analysis. But they are more US-centric.

    http://www.quantcast.com

    - Eddie.

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