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Google Adds Website Traffic Comparison to Trends

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?

Like 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.

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nice article! nice site. you're in my rss feed now
keep it up

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very helpful article

A very cool service by google what i like the most is that anyone can easily filter the data by country and dates, but i think they should also display Page views along with Daily Unique Visitors.
nice post

Just used it . Really helpful tool… Another gem from Google.

The factors that are determinant in a website’s http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www…. Alexa rankings apart from the data collected from the users of the Alexa toolbar are no where clearly mentioned. This somehow brings in a question of doubt and credibility issues as far as the Alexa rankings are concerned. However, even today the Alexa toolbar has the largest chunk in determining the ranking of a website.

Google has always come up new things regularly keeping u with the user requirements in all arenas. Google Trends for Websites sounds of great utility, I look forward to using it..

Thanks for this info on Google trends, I had no idea. I think it could be very useful. I too, look forward to using it.

Wow so here is one more service from Google, I did not know about TREND, in this busy world it has become really difficult to keep track of new releases. Thanks for your post I am sure it would be new to many..

Google is constantly evolving and changing to maximize the satisfaction of all of their users, so we really need to watch out for their latest trends and never be left behind.