Well, till date, most of the webmasters and website owners had very few ways of showing their traffic statistics to the public. For almost eternity, Alexa.com has been the chosen one, whose traffic rankings have been given some respect by most of the webmaster community. Though there have been many instances where the credibility of alexa rank have been questioned as well. Also, there are tips and tricks on how to increase your alexa rank which also further put a question mark on the credibility of the ranking system.
Besides for alexa there have been compete.com for US centric traffic and trafficestimate.com as well but none of those two were as popular as alexa for India. But now things are about to change as Google which always had the Google analytics code for Webmasters to show the trends for website traffic as well in terms of unique visitors. Im not sure how google computes these google trends for websites but its very possible that it uses one or more of its products for examples these statistics could be dependant on a lot of sources right from the google toolbar to google search traffic to google analytics to google adsense as well for the sites which have adsense installed.
Currently google trends which was upgraded for keywords just recently has a very plain vanilla product as far as Google websites traffic trends are concerned but with time and better feature addons google trends could easily overtake alexa or any other traffic analytics site as the premiere benchmark for comparing and analysing one’s traffic statistics. Also the current feature of google traffic trends is the ‘also visited feature’ in which a user can see which are the other websites that its users visit.
Nice post. I would love to add a bit more on Google Trends – Although it is not a perfect system but works for most of the times. But when you search for the Google properties you will find nothing. As per Google’s policy they do not reveal their data on Google trends. for eg: when you try to compare google.com with blogger or youtube…you don’t get any results.
One of the most important features that are missing in Google Trends is the numbers. Looking at trends, one can only see which site has more visitors but not how many.
The comparative example in your post can have numbers wildly ranging from 5000, 4000 and 1000 visitors to 50 mn, 40 mn and 10 mn visitors.
This kind of chart without numbers can be easily put up by any ranking services site, as there won’t be any way to question the credibility because there are no numbers.
Informative post. Pls give a link to the actual site you are referring to so that it will be easy for us to click the link and go.,
Thanks rushabh, anand and prasath.
@prasath – The site is the google trends site only. i.e. http://trends.google.com but the only thing is instead of keywords you need to type website urls in the search bar.
Anand – I agree to what you are saying but as even google trends for keywords was upgraded recently to add a scale point system im sure this is just the first beta version as far as google site traffic trends is concerned. after all when you have data from analytics, google search and adsense there cannot be a more comprehensive tool. Its just googles strategy to launch it part by part.
Yeah rajeev, If you give a link, i would have clicked it and opened in new window, instead of opening a browser and typing the url
Google is showing trafic for one of it’s sites… go to: http://www.google.rs
The two cannot be compared as the principle is different.
One gives traffic rating and another gives trends for a keyword or site. Both can be useful, Use both to know about a site or use google trend with keyword traffic estimator to have a better in side of the search.
hope to get a complete tool some day addressing all aspect in a reliable fashion.