Your guide to fact checking website traffic claims
Every now and then I see a story, where the reporter just repeats the traffic numbers that were given to them by the company.
You even have to deal with this when you market your site….I even had to deal with this myself, when I was promoting Style Guidance. About 1 in 5 blogs that we contacted, would get back to us trying to get us to pay $250-$500 for posts. Now that’s just not something that we do, but what’s interesting is that all of these blogs, that tried to get us to pay, claimed b.s. traffic numbers. They’d claim 3,000-5,000 visitors a day, when all data showed they had at most ~100(had Alexa rank of 1.5-2 million).
So here is a quick guide, to quickly find out whether or not the site’s quoted numbers are real.
Your first step is to download the Search Status firefox addon. What this will do is add to your browser three little boxes. 1 that tells you the site’s Google Page Rank, 1 that tells you the site’s Alexa rank, and 1 that tells you the Compete rank. The whole point of this is to get all the pieces of the puzzle, to figure out the site’s traffic.
Page Rank: This tells you, the site’s quality. Why? Because Page Rank mostly measures the quantity and the quality of the inbound links. And since Page Rank is trickled down, the higher the Page Rank, the better the quality of sites that linked to it. Here is my break down:
- Page Rank 0……this usually means that the site is either brand new(just launched), and Google hasn’t updated their page rank yet(they do it every 3-4 months), or that the site is dead.
- Page Rank 1-3…these are fairly easy to get, all you need is a few minor bloggers to talk about you..or a few dozen mentions on a bunch of forums.
- Page Rank 4……this pretty much separates the men from the boys. This is the part where you actually have to work for it…approach bloggers etc.
- Page Rank 5……This is pretty much where most “actual” sites on the internet reside. It’s not that easy to get, but if you give it time and a lot of effort you can reach it.
- Page Rank 6…..This you gotta earn. In most cases you need coverage from PR7+ sites….which are pretty rare by themselves. Pretty much this ranking is reserved for the top sites in their niche.(unless it’s some major publication)
- Page Rank 7,8,9,10 - these are more or less reserved for the most popular sites. You need a ton of coverage, and a ton of links. I’ll give you some examples:
- Page Rank 7 - YCombinator - their site gets covered all over. Weekly links from major tech blogs. Coverage from major news sites(WSJ, CNN). Links from hundreds of startups they’ve funded. Yet they are only a PR7.
- Page Rank 8 - Reddit/Digg - you know these right? The sites that have their widgets on 99% of the sites on the planet. Yet they are only a PR8.
- Page Rank 9 - Facebook/Twitter - that’s right, the biggest sites on the planet, don’t even have PR10. Or here is another good example…the official White House website…that’s right Google considers CNN(PR10) more important than the President of United States.
- Page Rank 10 - Official site of United States, Yahoo.com, CNN….the number of PR10 sites is very small
Alexa - the Alexa ranking is a good way to see how your site ranks with the rest of the world. It’s not that concrete, but you can get at least some idea of the site’s traffic. Now the early data is based on my site’s own numbers, and the letter is gleamed from some quick Google searches. Note: a lot of people think Alexa is just stats from the Alexa toolbar, apparently that is no longer true as of Nov, 2008. My breakdown is as follows:
- ~2,000,000 - ~50 people a day
- ~1,000,000 - ~200 people a day
- ~500,000 - ~400 people a day
- ~250,000 - ~500 people a day
- ~150,000 - ~1,000 people a day
- ~100,000 - ~2,000 people a day
- ~50,000 - ~3,000 people a day
- ~3,000 - ~40,000 people a day
These are just estimates. The Alexa # by itself is pretty much worthless. But it can give you a ballpark of where the site ranks. If someone with a rank of 5,000 tells you they are getting 250,000 users a day….well you know they are probably not telling the truth.
Compete: - I don’t personally use compete since it takes a while for them to update their rankings. Alexa tends to update theirs daily. I don’t think anyone actually uses compete to cite data, since it’s not real time.
Next what you need is some graphs. Why? Because they’ll tell you the real story. I like Quantcast.com since they give you a lot of extra data. But they do tend to focus on the more established sites, so you won’t see it for all sites.
But the graphs are useful to catch PR b.s. I’ll give you an example…today(yesterday) TC covered beautifulpeople.com, and how they supposedly kicked out 5,000 people for being fat( kinda what got me to write this up).
You go to their site and you’ll see that they have a PR of 5 and an Alexa Ranking of 16K. Both good stats, but once you check the graph, you see the true story. We see that the site, which has been around since 2001, has been pretty much dead until a small spike in October. And a huge spike in December. So all of that high “traffic” is temporary, and most likely due to some PR drive.
So as you can see, you can use a lot of these tools, to fact check, the site’s claims.
P.S. I know most of this stuff is quite simple, but a lot of people don’t know how to do this.
