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Jamie Wilkinson
Evan Roth
James PowderlyHow to Measure Any Website’s Traffic (For Free)
Have you ever wondered exactly who, what, and when people are visiting your website… or your competitors’ websites?
Without knowing your audience it’s difficult to make improvements towards your end goal, whether that’s becoming internet famo, selling more widgets, or just getting more page views. Here are a few free analytic tools to help you narrow down the tasks at hand by delivering detailed information about a website’s audience:
Compete
- Type in one or more URL and get estimates of their traffic, growth, and “velocity” (ooh): apple.com vs. microsoft.com
- Also shows what search terms are driving traffic to the sites
- Allows you to compare traffic between up to 5 other sites
- Measures the top 1 million US websites.
- Features an excellent blog: blog.compete.com
Google Trends
- Type in a search term, (everyone’s favorite example: “iphone”) and see how many people have been searching for it: link
- Type in a couple of words for comparison, like “iphone, blackberry”
- Cross-references with major news posts related to the search terms, helping explain spikes & dips
- Google trends now features web traffic estimations, too, but it’s not as reliable as other services. Try “apple.com, microsoft.com”
- Breakdown of traffic by country, city, and language
Quantcast
- Traffic rankings for any website… and detailed audience demographics: apple.com
- Measures frequency of visit, and classifies into cool “addicts,” “regulars,” “passers-by” user groups
- Analyzes what other sites the audience visits, and even what magazines they read (hello, media buys)
- Targeted towards advertisers, e.g. lists what kind of ads a site accepts (if any)
- Can add tracking code to your site to share/improve data about it (and deepen their own data reach)
Alexa
- Alexa was first to market with web traffic estimates, but its algorithms are now widely considered inferior to Compete & Quantcast
- Recently expanded to include more data about international audiences
Bonus:
Brandtags
- Not surprisingly, started by a marketing dude
- Addictive, stream-of-consciousness brand association game that shows visitors a logo and asks them to type the first thing that pops into their head.
- Aggregate associations reveal brand perception when viewed backwards
- Updated with new brands often, and offers an opportunity to suggest your brand
Excellent Tools, very important to any web marketing expert to use them, thanks
Great Post, many tools found here with tips on using them, thanks for sharing this post with us
Wonderfully useful page. If there were a measure of indispensability (whether people know it or not), this page would rank near the top. Thanks.
Awesome posting,very informative as well thanks for sharing such a useful information,please keep it up.
Exactly what i was looking for.. a great post. thank you so much jamie.
yes these tools will help websites owners to know how much traffic did their websites get, thanks for this informative post
This is extremely helpful! Thank you!
really very informative post, these tools are very important to websites owner and seo developer, for me I use google analytics tool to track stats about my websites, thanks