
Ask HN: How accurate are Alexa/Compete/Quantcast for your website(s)? - aw3c2
I feel that many people's tendency to take those estimates too seriously is a bad thing.<p>This post was inspired by a Reddit admin's comment showing that Quantcast was far off: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/cahpw/digg_is_dead/c0r9904<p>Please post numbers for months that are fully shown at all those sites already, so not from this month. You don't have to post your domains for privacy reasons, but if you would, please do.
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terra_t
I've got some sites that are 'quantified' with Quantcast (have the tracking
code) and the numbers agree within a few percent with other analytics: that's
for sites that get anywhere between 50 visits a month to 500k.

If you're not quantified, Quantcast is a joke and the other sites are always a
joke, no matter what. There was a long time when Alexa thought the top 20
sites in the world were all in Korea because, I guess, everybody in Korea had
the Alexa toolbar. One day they changed their formula to prevent this because
people were pointing out that their stats make no sense.

Compete, in particular, has a free service that's designed to annoy you into
paying for the service, but everything I see on their free service and on
their blog convinces me that the paid service is worthless... For instance,
they had nothing to blog about one day, so they blogged that "Girls Gone Wild"
gets 30% of its traffic from women... Everybody knows that systems like that
use 50-50 gender statistics as a bayesian prior, so they always claim that
sites have more balanced audiences than they really do.

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jbyers
Wikispaces.com does 9M uniques and 75M pageviews a month per Google Analytics.
Quantcast says 1.4M uniques, Compete says 900K. Neither trend in the right
direction.

Alexa is comically low on pageviews and maybe 6x low on reach when we compare
those stats to other sites who make their numbers public. However, Alexa tends
to head in the right direction.

I looked at Comscore data on us a few years ago and it was less wrong than
Quantcast and Compete, but still well off the mark.

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jasonkester
My experience is that they're all easily gamed if you want to.

As an example, I once spent a year browsing with the Alexa toolbar, and it
boosted every one of my sites up into the top 100k just from my own traffic.
After ditching the toolbar, they all dropped back down.

As to accuracy, Compete isn't even on the right order of magnitude for any of
my sites. It's way over for one, way under for another. Just no correlation to
reality.

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AmberShah
CodeAnthem.com has been up a few months, so only full month avail was April on
Compete:

Google Analytics (unique visits): 77K

Compete: 20K

Quantcast: No Data

I really have no idea how to find comparable stats on Alexa (since it uses
percentages) but you can check it to see.

Compete's referral data and search analytics were also way off. I might think
this is due to the site being pretty new ... but I'd rather they said nothing
(like Quantcast) than be way off.

Based on how wrong they are for my site, I would not put much stock in them
for other people's...

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justinchen
If you're "quantified" on Quantcast, it should be pretty spot on to Google
Analytics since it's direct measurement. If you're not, then it's definitely
going to be off like Compete.

I use Compete stats as relative measurements against other websites (assuming
everyone's off by a similar ratio). I use Quantcast stats to look at the demo
info.

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snewe
Somewhat random fact: comment solutions like IntenseDebate and Disqus
incorporate Quantcast into their js, so you are indirectly getting counted by
such services if you use IntenseDebate, etc. I searched for an out-clause, but
found none.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Could you please expand upon the implications of this? It is unclear to me
whether this is positive or negative aspect for the different entities
involved: the commenting apps, Quantcast and the website they are embedded on.

~~~
snewe
I checked my quantcast stats a few weeks back after taking off their js months
ago. I noticed that they still had a good picture of views/etc and wondered
why. It appears that they were getting info from Intense Debate.

I originally took the Quantcast code off my site b/c it slowed things down and
despite having fairly accurate counts, it had skewed demographics. I didn't
want to encourage them, so I took off the script. However, my use of
IntenseDebate meant that I was still using it.

I don't think IntenseDebate is doing anything wrong, but I would like an opt-
out.

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bdickason
I would urge people to include Comscore as well. None of these sites track
accurately. Here's a site I used to work on.

Site: Gameriot.com Month: May '10 (May 1 - May 31) Google Analytics: 307,000
"Visitors/Month" (Unique Visits) Alexa: 25,856 Traffic Rank (has been as high
as 2,000) Compete: 72k "Unique Visitors" Quantcast: 201.5k 'Worldwide
Visitors' Comscore: 144k "US Visitors" (we have to pay more than $30k/yr for
global access)

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modoc
Site that's been around for years:

Google Analytics: ~1,000,000 visits/month

Compete: 110,000 visits/month

Alexa: 9,548 traffic rank?

Quantcast: 5,000 visits/month

They all seem to be very low and very all over the road.

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petercooper
A theme I've noticed is that techie sites have their traffic grossly
underestimated. If the figures are being estimated through traffic going
through a handful of points, this makes sense to me as the visitors to, say, a
Python documentation site are likely to be less diverse than those to a Flash
games site or Facebook.

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WalterGR
<http://onlineslangdictionary.com/>

\-----Uniques (March)

Google Analytics - 470k uniques

Compete - 124k

Quantcast - 156k (not "quantified")

\-----Rank (at present)

Alexa - 19,730 in the US

Compete - 16,735 (US?)

Quantcast - 12,957 in the US

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michaelbuckbee
As a corollary to this, how would people rate Google Analytics versus their
own traffic logs?

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aw3c2
Here are my small niche sites:

\--------------------

 _Site #1_ (classic gaming related)

April 2010 - Unique Visitors:

My server logs: 16000

Compete: 700

Quantcast: -

Alexa: -

\--------------------

 _Site #2_ (music related and random things)

April 2010 - Unique Visitors:

My server logs: 5000

Compete: 2326

Quantcast: -

Alexa: -

~~~
skinnymuch
how do you find the uniques through server logs? I know software like
webalizer and awstats overexxagerate quite a bit if left alone (count too many
bots, extra uniques where they shouldn't be, etc).

Compete.com is US only traffic so it is pretty spot on for your second site.
However it's weird that your first site with 500+ uniques/day avg. doesn't
have a quantcast estimate.

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hvs
One thing to keep in mind is that cookies are not people. People clear their
cookies, so any reliance on that as a measure of unique visitors has the
potential to vary widely.

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Skyline
In my experience, <http://www.google.com/adplanner> has been far more accurate
than Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast.

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ivankirigin
Compete measures iframes and js includes, meaning any company with a
moderately successful non-flash widget is drastically overestimated.

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chaosmachine
Off by an order of magnitude for many of my sites.

