Jun

20

Google Adds Website Traffic Comparison to Trends

June 20, 2008 |

Google has decided to jump into the Web Traffic comparison business by releasing a new layer to Google Trends names Google Trends for Websites.

Very few people these days take the data from publicly available website traffic comparison tools like Alexa and Compete too seriously. At best, both can be used to analyze trends, as their exact numbers for traffic often vary widely. The major problem with any traffic comparison tool is that there are very few trustworthy sources for that data. Alexa uses data from a toolbar plugin, while Compete relies on data from 2 Million Internet users it gathers from ISPs, ASPs, Opt-in Panels and the Compete toolbar.

How is Google Trends different?

Google of course sits on a wellspring of data and they are using it to power Google Trends for Websites. According to the FAQ, Google gets its data from,

“aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.”

With this, Google might be able to get a slight edge on both Alexa and Compete in terms of quality of data, though ‘third-party market research’ casts a very wide net and could include pretty much all of the sources Compete also uses.

Like Compete, the user can easily filter the data by country and dates, but the only metric available is ‘Daily Unique Visitors.’ This is quite similar to Alexa’s rather limited and confusing ‘Reach’ and ‘Page Views’ data, but Compete displays a wider array of engagement data such as average length of stay and visits per month.

One area where Google’s data is most likely going to be far more trustworthy than any of its competitors is in displaying search trends for a particular site.

What’s Not to Like?

imageLike all Google tools, Trends for Websites follows Google’s minimalist design philosophy, yet its overall feature set is also quite minimalist. It is not possible to embed a graph or export data, for example.

Also, while Trends for Websites displays data for up to five different sites, it is limited in its abilities to actually compare them beyond number of unique visits.

Right now, the data Google displays also doesn’t seem to go back in time very far. Even for a site like CNN, the longest time period Trends will display is from June 2007 to today – for sites that have been around for a long time, that’s not a lot of information and obviously doesn’t display any longterm trends.

Verdict

Google Trends for Websites still feels a bit limited, but it is a Google Labs product and I would expect them to start adding more features soon. Right now, if anything, it is good to see more competition in the analytics market as this might drive the other players to start innovating and becoming more reliable as well.


Share This

Related Posts

Comments