Thread: Alexa and Compete useless?

MG Siegler of Techcrunch says: "If You Cite Compete Or Alexa For Anything Besides Making Fun Of Them, You’re A Moron"

Apparently the data from Alexa and Compete don't match actual traffic stats at all, and are worthless, at least if TC is to be believed. What do you think?

I agree, those sites are pretty much useless now and are not accurate. I do like to keep an eye on Alexa Hot URLs, though, from time to time.

Alexa Internet - What's Hot

I ignore all other tools.
I look at my traffic stats in my blogs, and also the stats in the cpanel.
Those are more accurate than alexa.

Nice.
My recent blog entry?
Segway Market is Now in Advertising?
I am number two in google for that term.
Just a few minutes after posting.
Now bing?
Geesh...they are slow....

its useless i agree. i don't see why someone would actually make it as a basis to buy a site or see site's performance on the web.
i'd rather look at the SERP of the sites keyword and PR as i think PR still is used by google.

Well, on the positive side for Compete.com:
- When starting research on a site to buy, if someone says they have basically any non-trivial traffic over more than a 2 month time frame and Compete shows 0 results something is amiss and I usually will forgo looking at the site (aka wasting more time) at that point. As a result, for me it just serves as a good starting indicator of relative unique traffic value acking that for low numbers (< ?????) it is an estimate.

- For Alexa, I like using the siteinfo section for keyphrase / content ideas when taking a look at competing sites. As an example:
Netbuilders.org Site Infodd is the keyphrases listed on Compete and Alexa don't match normally which to me == even more ideas especially when combined with SEMRUSH

Here's a copy->paste of an email I got later today from Compete.com for the curious:

Introducing Compete Email Alerts
	Today marks the launch of the new Compete.com, and we think you're going to love it. Why? Not only can you track websites that you're interested in, now you can set automated email alerts for those sites making it easier than ever to keep up-to-date To log in to your Site Analytics account, visit any site profile and click Log In. We've made sure to transfer the last ten sites that you tracked to your new account home.
	Cheers, Your friends at Compete

Alexa tracks traffic using a cookie that is routinely removed by anti-spyware programs.

It may not be accurate, but might not be completely useless. Alexa can be used as a general metric to see how much traffic your competitors are getting relative to Alexa's flawed estimate of your own traffic.

If you want to see how well your own sites are doing, use your sever logs. Google Analytics is also not accurate because it cannot track data for anyone who has JavaScript disabled. That can be up to 5% of your visitors. When an IE user sets the Security Level to High, JavaScript is disabled.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

I ignore all other tools.
I look at my traffic stats in my blogs, and also the stats in the cpanel.
Those are more accurate than alexa.

Yes, You look at your cpanel stats, but the advertiser? They will look at your Alexa or whichever public stats. Alexa is not correct, but within(!) a niche it's pretty accurate (compared to other sites in the niche). So the advertiser will know exactly which site has the most traffic.

I wouldn't say either are useless but you should always have higher quality stat tracking for your own personal website.