6 Websites to Track A Website’s Traffic
When you search the web, you might find a really awesome website. Many people might judge that website depending on the number of visits that it receives on a daily/weekly/monthly basis but how do you find out information like that?
Well here are some web site traffic tracking websites that can tell you what you need to know.
(Note, these are not web services for tracking traffic on your website. These websites basically estimate the traffic levels of other websites based on a number of publicly available factors. For tracking traffic on your website refer to free traffic analytics tools.)
Google Adplanner
I think that Google AdPlanner should be your first stop to check out any stats about a particular website. As it is mainly for advertisers looking at website statistics to see if it is worthwhile to advertise on a particular site, this makes it a great option to get accurate and reliable data.
Face it, what doesn’t Google know? They have data on nearly every website but that is another issue. As you can see from the stats for MakeUseOf, anyone can tell how many visits we get and what type of people regularly read us. It is also good as you can select to show data from one particular country.
Alexa
Alexa is another popular web site traffic tracking site and it is owned by Amazon. Although it involves a lot of clicking to get your results, it has proven to be useful. As you can see by the image, you have a lot of stats that you can browse through.
Compete
Compete is another great website to see how many visitors go to a website. However, there are a lot of limitations if you do not have a pro account. But apart from that, you can save the graph as an image. Overall, if you want a nice graph of a website’s growth (or decline) Compete is a nice option.
BizInformation
Biz Information is a great website as not only does it provide you with a graph of unique website visitors (from Compete) but it also tells you how much it is worth (although I don’t know how accurate it is).
The other good thing about Biz Information is that it also tells you how many submissions it has in popular social networking websites such as Digg and Stumbleupon.
So do you think the owners of MUO will sell for that price? With nearly 100,000 subscribers, who knows?
Quantcast
With Quantcast, you have a few options to play with. You can change the graph to show by day, week, month and to select a range of dates to show from one week to all time. Another great thing about Quantcast is that it shows you the US demographics of visitors such as age, sex, income, children and education level. But I would think Google Adplanner would be better.
URL Trends
URL Trends has a nice user interface and well placed ads, so be careful what you are clicking. But the web site traffic tracking that they provide is good. As you can see from the image, it shows where users are coming from, and you can find more details as you read from the ‘report navigation’ links. If you have a paid subscription, you can download your report in a PDF format.
Which tracking tools do you use to look for visitor stats for websites you find? Let us know in the comments.
Living the high life of a Blogger and as a website owner. Find out more about me and my websites by visiting my personal site jackcola.org or view my MUO author page.
That is a fantastic blog post, as there are many different perspectives to choose from with regards to traffic! We have relied mainly on Alexa and Compete, but the Google Adplanner site is great! I can’t believe that I had never heard of it!
I like Google Ad planner a lot. It is something that Google hasn’t promoted much. You would think it would be easy to find in Google Adwords, but it is not. The other thing I like about Adplanner is that (I think) it is reliable and accurate due to most websites using Analytics, Adwords and Adsense. With this data and the Google Searches, they have a large database of information to source its data.
Good Round up of website traffic tools. I recently see the Ad Planner which is more improvised tool now which is really loved by Avinash from Google. He mentioned his videos about this, you will find his video on http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/09/episode-2-bottlenecks-to-implementation.html
Thanks for fantastic info. I have learned new sites. thx!!!
Nice information!
I wouldn’t put it among your Top 6, but I use Traffic Estimate for a quick estimate, and it also provides you with a cool traffic estimate widget you can add on your site (if that’s your site’s thing).
I’ve found its results to be consistent with the ones above.
Great post!its very useful and the informative that tells how track the the website traffic !
Been looking for an article listing this for a while, glad to see it pop up in my reader today, thanks guys.
Thanks everyone. This is what we try and do at Make Use Of – provide you with articles that are interesting and helpful to the you (the readers)
Remember, if you want to post a question about anything, please don’t hesitate to contact anyone of us, or you can post questions on our Facebook Page – http://www.facebook.com/makeuseof
And today is a special day for MUO as we reached 100 000 subscribers.
I have read this post.really it is very nice also very informative.thanks
Great list of sites for site traffic analysis.
I should have known google had a free webpage traffic tracking option. Alexa is cool, but it tends to favor sites that have more computer savvy users since it requires the toolbar for tracking.
The webpage valuation site is really cool too. I’m going to see how much all my favorite pages are worth right now. I love MUO!
I just checked http://bizinformation.org and found it to be very inaccurate regarding traffic. I know for a fact that my site doesn’t get 500 unique visitors a day (yet). It’s a cool novelty page though.
Yes, I agree with you, I found it too the same. For traffic other visitor tracking concerns I prefer using Google Analytics.
Some great tips here for more traffic.
Thanks
Regards
Gerry
Alexa, of course. But I will try BizInformation.. it sounds interesting.
Hi,
Would you like to share what is special about Alexa?
- J.
Website Designing
My personal favourite traffic estimation website is
http://www.estimix.com . It seems to generate very accurate traffic information.
Actually, I went to this site and it didn’t even have our site within the search. This was disappointing and inaccurate as we have a 15k rating on Alexa and bizinformation.org values us around 450k. So, I think Estimix sux.
Very helpful post! Thx
Alexa bizinfo and compete are all based on alexa engine I think. Why not use Nielse, Comscore or ivw?
Exactly, all alexa stuff is based on their engine. Personally I wont recommend relying over Alexa ranks and other things. There are good alternatives too as you mentioned.
- J.
Web Designing
Wow, thanks VERY much for posting this info – it’s incredibly helpful!
This is really a helpful resource for me.
Thanx for this post!
Nice list. Another site that can be added to the list is beencounter. With beencounter you can know which sites your visitors have been to. You can see if visitors have been to your competitors site and even use an API to show them personalized content.
very very helpful! TQ TQ!
There is a huge difference between the traffic estimation as provided by Alexa comparing it to compete and quantcast. I believe compete and quantcast are more reliable.Any thoughts about that.
Great stuff. Web traffic is something everyone would love.
Winder why there is a huge difference using those tool?
Who is more accurate?
Sincerely,
Alexander
The reason for the inaccuracy of numbers is because each of the sites above have a different way of measuring site data, and the period of the data may be over a specific time period.
For example, Google Adplanner calculates its unique visitors using Cookies over a specific month. If users delete there browser cookies, you can see it will shower higher.
If you look where Complete gets its information from, they say:
“Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources. Compete’s standard normalization process is applied to our monthly and weekly metrics. Compete relies on share based measures to report its daily metrics.”
which again, is complete different from Adplanner.
You also have to make sure that you when your comparing data, you are comparing US to US, not US to Everything.
I hope this answers your questions to why the results are different.