Check Competitor's Traffic Tools - how accurate is this one?

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Hi All,

I have been looking for a tool other than Alexa that can show how much traffic other sites get. I have several but nono of them seem very accurate and of course we all know how skewed Alexa can be.

Just found this one, which I had HIGH hopes for. But when I checked all my own sites against my logs their numbers were like 25 times higher on some of my sites than my own logs. It's counting visitor sessions so probably just counts differently than my logs.

Which is OK for my purposes as long as I know they are consistently that high accross the board. Then I can still use it to some degree to measure one site's traffic against another. If if the numbers are wrong as long as the numbers are fairly relative accross most domains. Does that make sense?

So what do you guys see when you try this tool? Is it couting a lot higher thatn your logs?
http://www.metricsmarket.com/tools/trafficchecker/ (see how much traffic your competitor's getting)

Any other tools that do this that are good? I would especially love a tool that lets you compare traffic of 2 sites on a graph like Alexa does.

Speaking of Alexa - my traffic is UP but suddenly Alexa is showing my traffic as WAY down. Anyone else seeing this trend or is it just me? Have a bunch of people stopped using Alexa?

Linda

[I, Brian]

Just tried it around a few sites - it's near the mark on some sites, completely off on others.

I wonder if it isn't simply using Alexa rankings, and setting an arbitrary number to correlate with traffic according to Alexa?

[seobook]

here are a few of the #s for SEO blogs...

Search Engine Journal - alexa 26,463 - marketmetrics 264,800 visitors / month

Search Engine Lowdown - alexa 25,608 - marketmetrics 271,400 visitors / month

Search Engine Roundtable - alexa 25,220 - marketmetrics 274,500 visitors /month.

SEO Book - alexa 19,859 - marketmetrics 328,000 visitors / month

Traffick - alexa 40,703 - marketmetrics 192,000 visitors / month

Search Engine Blog - alexa 93,769 - marketmetrics 102,300 visitors / month

Searchblog - alexa 37,424 - marketmetrics 204,500 visitors / day


look how closely the first three fall in line with one another...alexa vs marketmetrics. also every single site correlates alexa vs marketmetrics.

the alexa #s have absoluetly nothing to do with actual traffic. for example:


Andy Beal (Search Engine Lowdown) creates a ton more pages than I AND has newsfeeds of his site. newsfeeds frequently tend to pick up a decent amount of traffic. I believe he gets about 3-4x as much traffic as my site does.
SearchEngineBlog probably gets a bunch more traffic than many of the other blogs, but since many of its users are likely sophisticated (and likely do not use Alexa) and because it creates less pages than most of the other blogs it has a higher Alexa # than its actual traffic (relative to the other blogs).
Alexa tends to be extremely webmaster biased in that sites related to webmaster stuff get artificially inflated traffic volumes.

[rustybrick]

Its also important to note that most Web analytics tools track unique visitors and even repeat visitors differently.

There are huge discrepancies between one analytics tool and the next. In addition, the same brand and version can differ based on how your server and how the analytic tool is actually set up.

So even if you obtain access to your competitors analytical tools, they can and do vary from others.

[rogerd]

In a very gross sense, the numbers don't look completely wacky. However, even with their large claimed sample size I'd still expect the numbers to be better for large, very popular sites where the sample size will be bigger. Low traffic sites are more likely to be influenced by a small number of data points.

Also not clear is what sample bias might exist. E.g., getting a perfectly "average" or representative base of tracking participants is tough. For general interest sites with high traffic, it may not matter much. For specialty sites with lower volume, significant skew may occur. (Alexa, for example, almost certainly rates webmaster and SEO-oriented sites higher than general interest sites because webmasters and SEOs are more likely to surf with Alexa installed.) Geographic skewing will almost certainly occur, too.

[MentalDev]

Seems someone has copied the service and come up with

http://www.trafficestimate.com/

possibly based on the same algo as the numbers posted by seobook whilst higher on the new one do seem to be very similar..?

[seobook]

Seems someone has copied the service and come up with
http://www.trafficestimate.com/
possibly based on the same algo as the numbers posted by seobook whilst higher on the new one do seem to be very similar..?
it is really not a hard concept to duplicate. not sure how much value it has since it really is just another version of Alexa data...

[casavarese]

its not so far off the mark