Web Traffic Research (Compete & Alexa)
I’m on a web-traffic research kick lately and have been reading up on companies like Compete and Alexa (amongst many others). I wrote a blog posting a few weeks ago talking about when web stats don’t match up on campaigns (buy/sell side impressions) which can cause a major headache in advertising campaigns. As you know, when placing media buys across sites, you want to know as granular traffic numbers as possible so you can justify why you’re spending the amount of dollars you’ve alloted. If you’re looking to reach the 18-25 year old female, then you want to make sure you’re receiving that audience. If not, you’re paying for wastage. The goal of any media planner is to minimize wastage as much as possible, while still delivering a contextually relevant campaign.
Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures and founder of Truemors, interviewed the CEO of Compete (Stephen DiMarco) and I found it extremely interesting. I’m also partial to Guy because he was the first evangelist at Apple, a brand that I love.
Some of the points that Stephen touches upon (full article here):
- We have a diverse sample of 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users that have given us permission to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys.
- A great example is the work we’re doing in the truck segment for auto marketers; this segment is an all-out battle between Ford, GM, and Toyota with nearly a billion dollars of advertising spent each year. We’re using online behavior to predict the number of people shopping each truck in the category to understand how campaigns are swaying shoppers throughout the month. This helps auto marketers map how cost effective their advertising is, and guides whether they need to up dealer incentives or increase advertising to hit their monthly sales target.
- How is Compete different from Alexa?
- We like to say to say that more is better—and by measuring 2,000,000 U.S. consumers each month, we’re substantially bigger than Comscore. Our larger sample gives us more reporting depth and we feel our results are more accurate because we measure one million websites compared to the 15,000 that Comscore Media Metrix measure. There is incredible value in being able to accurately measure the “torso” of the web—sites in between the head and the tail—we’re better at this than Comscore because our sample is so much larger and we see things that their data just doesn’t pick up. We also have an accuracy advantage because the diversity of our data sources helps us identify and eliminate biases that show up from time to time. Our multi-source approach is a big point of differentiation—no one else in the market can do it—transforming more than ten different data streams into a common format and then performing statistical projections across 2,000,000 people on a nightly basis is no small feat.Alexa is a storied internet brand, but unfortunately a big part of the story is how bad its web traffic estimates are. Unlike Alexa, we go through a rigorous panel selection and normalization process that involves an independent RDD survey, demographic scaling and extensive QA from our data operations team. Alexa, on the other hand, has a single source of data—its toolbar—so it’s very susceptible to bias. In fact, we often get emails from companies offering to increase our Alexa ranking by downloading tons of toolbar and then visiting our site!
Straight from the Compete blog, here is what they say vs. Alexa.