Category Archives: Web Analytics

2010 Internet Stats

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Internet Statistics for 2010
The most recent stats I posted were related to the 2010 holiday season and the record breaking sales days. I came across this excellent article here at Pingdom. Every time I review internet statistics I am always amazed at how large the numbers are. Here are some interesting figures taken from their list, go to their site to view all and they also included the references of the numbers origination.

  • 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010
  • 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010
  • 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010)
  • 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year
  • 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube
  • 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010)

See more detailed stats at their site.

Top 50 Properties for October 2010

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Top Web Properties
comScore does provide some free materials such as the Top 50 web properties in the United States. I recall these lists, a long time ago, would only come with a listing of the sites in order. This particular list, as you will see, also comes with commentary and analysis from comScore which is very interesting. Here is a direct link to the page on their site which does not have the information but has a link to a pdf file, I am not sure why they did not post the information on the page but nonetheless you can obtain the PDF.

Analysis
I for one think the analysis section is very helpful and they have interesting insights. They discuss the impact of political news, online gambling and humor sites in detail. Also broken out are the top sites ranked by those which had the most unique visitors, Google Sites, Yahoo! Sites, Microsoft Sites, Facebook etc., they are all listed out. Also they list the top ad networks in order of those that reach the largest audience, Google Ad Network, Yahoo! Network Plus, AOL Advertising and others. I will not steal their thunder, so take a look at the comScore 6 page analysis.

Internet is Third Most Popular News Platform

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According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project the internet is now the third most popular news platform, see their study entitled Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. The internet is third behind local and national television news. It is a ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. To me this is substantial.

Unreachable Demographic
Also in their report is that 6 in 10 get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day. As I read news on my mobile device I realize too that I do not consume as much news with a newspaper as I once did, or as my father did. To reach me through advertising it must be online, otherwise I am an unreachable demographic. More individuals are fitting into this category daily.

In my opinion a marketing campaign used to be a mix of different forms of media to reach a demographic, such as print, radio, magazines, newspapers. However these days I believe it is entirely possible that some demographics can only be reached by one form of media, online media. My two cents.

Their report is excellent, take a look through the link above.

AdSense Tied to Analytics

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Once you have AdSense and Analytics tied together you can gleen invaluable information. By tying these two google tools together you are able to dig into site revenue via google adsense.

Here is an example of the statistics and revenue information you can find. See the screen shot on the right. First note that you can obtain these statistics in aggregate for the site and on a page by page basis. Each page will show the revenue generated. The typical google analytic filters apply, such as the time frame of viewing a day, week, month, or other specific date range. The amount of revenue is shown as well as an estimate of the CPM. CPM is the revenue per thousand, more typically called the cost per thousand but can be described as revenue. More stats are shown.

This information can be invaluable in determining the value of specific areas of the site as well as pages. Here is a previous article to assist in the linking of google analytics to google adsense.

New WordPress Stats

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WordPress announced two new statistic features in the Site Stats. Here is the official WordPress post.


Home Page Stats
You may not have realized but the statistics did not show your home page in the past. In other words the front page of your site was not listed in the statistics. Therefore you would not know, other than through a statistics provider such as Google analytics, how your home page performed.

Posts On Which Day
If you host your blog on WordPress.com you will also, as you move your mouse on the statistics, see which posts were created on each day. A nice feature, however you can obviously also find this by simply looking within the posts which are sorted by date.

Why are compete.com traffic stats so low?

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Compete.com only tracks the United States traffic to websites. We have worked for many companies assisting them with determining the discrepancies between multiple tracking services. Most everyone uses the free services such as Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and of course paid services such as Comscore. Typically these four services are compared to a websites statistics provided by a service such as Google Analytics.

When comparing actual site analytics to these free services you are bound to see discrepancies. By actual we mean tracking of every page as opposed to statistical sampling which then infers the amount of web traffic or pages viewed to a site.

I wanted to point out that Compete only provides web traffic data from users in the United States. Just knowing that will answer most of the initial questions regarding discrepancy in compete data with your own.

You should also know Compete’s methodology for determining web traffic to a particular website. While Google analytics provides code to put on every page of your website in an attempt to obtain actual data, Compete uses a panel of 2 million individuals. The panel is a cross section of Internet users in the United States and they obtain click stream data from ASP’s and ISPs. They also obtain data from widgets, applications, and their toolbar.

You can read more about the Compete panel and projections on their website. It is important to know the differences between the methodologies of each of the tracking companies. Not only do you need to know the methodologies but you also need to know the nomenclature as each one of them has different definitions. To properly compare one to the other it is important to know what each data point means and how it is defined. In other words how do they define a visitor, a visit, do they use cookies etc.

Google Trends vs. Compete, Alexa, Quantcast and Comscore?

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Google Trends for Websites
Google Analytics is WOW, Google Ad Planner is amazing, Google Trends – hmmm, not so much. It is as if they started to create Google Trends for Websites, heard the phone ring – answered the phone – had a long conversation, and forgot they ever started it in the first place. haha.

Do not get me wrong, I am truly amazed at most all Google products, especially when it comes to Google Analytics which is incredibly powerful. However, I am not sure what the point of the current Google Trends for Websites is. After using Quantcast, Alexa and Compete, and the pay-for-play Comscore, this makes you say ‘huh?’ Here is the basic graph you receive:

google_trends_twitter

Placeholder for World Domination?
It could very well be that Google is merely waiting for the right moment to unleash their own public web analytics after a certain threshold of Google Analytics users haev been met. Quantcast has a twofold method for providing site analytics, the traditional polling method and code on pages if the site owner opts for it (what they call quantified). Google has the same capabilities.

Google Search Bar
They can utilize their install base of the Google Search bar to obtain site analytics across the web. Much like Alexa does.

Google Analytics
Much like Quantcast, many site users have the Quantcast code on their site. This provides an accurate measurement of traffic to that site as opposed to extrapolation based on a sample size.

Sleeping Dog
Right now there is no reason to use the Google Trends for Websites, however that sleeping dog may awake, utilize Google Analytics installs and Search Bar installs to crush all others. Wow, what would that do to Comscore who charges and arm and a leg for their data? Comscore is probably not too happy about the Google Media Planner – now that is quite impressive.

Quantcast Media Planner

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Services to measure website rankings by traffic have been around for quite some time. The most well known, as it is free, is probably Alexa. The second most well known, however a paid service and much more comprehensive and substantially more data than just site traffic, is Comscore. Others are Nielsen (paid), Compete (free) and Quantcast (free). Still there are more.

Most of the free services, such as Alexa, Compete and Quantcast have site traffic rankings based on unique visitors, page views and other statistics. Each determine statistics of a site differently, some watch which sites people visit and others have you place code on your pages (or both). Other ways to use site traffic services are not just to determine which sites have the most traffic but to determine what type of visitors each site has, whether they have content you are looking for or demographics of site visitors. This type of data used to be obtainable as paid only. In comes Quantcast.

Quantcast Media Planner
Quantcast has free tools to search through sites for you with an easy to use search query. Their results show which sites they obtain traffic data from as a third party observer and which sites have their code installed. If the code is installed there is a much better chance of having accurate data.

Sign up for a free account at Quantcast, login, and choose media planner on the upper menu. The right hand side has your search results and the left hand side has your search options.

quantcast_demographics
The searching capability is amazing. You can see from the graphic on the right that sites can be narrowed down by demographics. Categories such as Gender, Income, Age, and more are available.

These days with privacy concerns so high the amount of data that is actually collected by ad servers to serve up your ad is less than it was years ago. The data you can obtain at Quantcast is about all you can use to target ads. Therefore when determining which sites to advertise on, the Quantcast tool is a great site finder. Use these demographics to narrow your site.

quantcast_categories
You can also use, in addition to demographics, their category list to find categories to target as well. You may want to target taxes found within the financial services category.

You may then narrow search again based on the minimum or maximum number of US visitors the site reaches each month. Lastly you can export the search results into an excel spreadsheet.

Overall the Quantcast media planner is an amazing tool, especially for free.
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The Power of Web Analytics

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I discuss many topics on this site. My approach is to give you a well rounded view into all the various areas you need to be aware of and have a working knowledge of to be successful online over time. This is assuming your desire is to have your own site, shop, or other online entity and profit it from it. Of course you do not need to be a Jack, or Jill, of all trades if you work in one of the areas I touch on and are looking to be an expert in any one area.

When it comes to one area in particular, I have a personal affinity for web analytics. What you can derive from your website analytics, analytics from search engines you may advertise from, and other niche information you may track, is the key to assuring your site is performing. Performing may be obtaining the lowest customer acquisition cost, increasing the number of pages per visitor, enticing visitors to download an ebook, or take advantage of a particular offer and more.

I wrote an instructional article recently on understanding Google AdWords and Google analytics for conversion tracking and business intelligence, and have touched on analytics in general. I spend a lot of time with metrics, particularly with respect to site traffic and customer acquisition as well as retention through our Phase One Accelerators consultancy.

As I have been spending more time on the subject of web analytics I came across the Web Analytics Association. A great site to watch and depending on your interest, a good organization as well. Their mission, taken from their site is:

“The Web Analytics Association leads and supports the members by providing quality education, developing standards and best practices, conducting research and advocating for issues that advance the industry. the Web Analytics Association

As you can imagine, when looking at Google Analytics, Nielson, Omniture, and other analytics programs, trying to reconcile the disparate information. Web Analytics Association is attempting to help develop standards. I came across this site by way of a web analytics consultancy practice Web Analytics Demystified and a link to their Analytics Blog is here. They have excellent well written articles.

I hope you find these two web analytic sources helpful, particularly the organization as they seem to have frequent educational webcasts.