I wish I would’ve kept that going, but unfortunately my focus changed and I wasn’t paying as much attention to the space so it didn’t feel right to do the guide again. However, throughout this time I’ve continued to consistently use the various public website tracking services such as Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, and Google AdPlanner to do research, check out competitors, and watch the sites that I’ve built over time.

I’ve generally been very frustrated with the services, and from everything I’ve ever read I’m not alone. Also according to Compete, they are all experiencing less usage over time as well.

Oh, except if you use Quantcast to check all three of them or Alexa to check all three of them you’ll mostly see trends that have them holding steady. Wait, actually on Quantcast you’ll see that Alexa is dropping. Except Google AdPlanner agrees with Compete that Compete and Quantcast are dropping badly, yet it thinks Alexa is on the rise? And on Alexa you’ll see that they don’t have enough traffic data to rank Alexa? That’s just laughable.

The takeaway is that not only are the numbers themselves not that accurate, even the trends vary wildly from service to service. Even though they all use slightly different ranking methods, it’s clear that they aren’t catching even the trends right.

This is tough though. It’s not like these services haven’t tried over the years to get accurate from using toolbars, to panels, and more. Out of the bunch, I like what Quantcast has tried to do in offering publishers the ability to put their tag on their site so that it can be directly measured by Quantcast. The benefits being that at least one service has your traffic being somewhat accurate, and that perhaps that will help with advertisers and provide demographic information.

Unfortunately that offer isn’t compelling enough to get a majority of publishers participating. In an unscientific browsing of their rankings of publishers, you can see that near the top of the rankings they get about 30-50% of publishers participating, but once you get down to the the ranking of this blog you get about 1-2% participating. There just isn’t much incentive for smaller publishers to participate.

Unless that incentive can be figured out, it seems like our best shot at getting a relatively accurate gauge would be for Google to do it. They have the largest number of publishers using their Google Analytics product, most of the largest publishers use DoubleClick for ad serving, and through Google search and other methods they probably have some sense of traffic and trending even if publishers aren’t using Google Analytics or DoubleClick.

I believe some of these things are data inputs for their Google AdPlanner tool which gives traffic estimates. However, even though I use Google Analytics and DoubleClick for ad serving on this blog, they don’t enough traffic data to rank ConversionRater.

Of course, there are data privacy issues which I believe keep them from being able to use Google Analytics or DoubleClick data directly without the publishers giving permission. But why not give publishers an option in Google Analytics to let their visitor/visits/pageviews be public if they want? Again though we have the incentive problem, why should publishers participate in making this data public?

I don’t know the answer today. If someone could figure this out though, they could create a very valuable service. Yes, I know Comscore exists as well, but since it costs significant money to access I’ve never been a big user. Plus, it has had no shortage of complaints and publishers are often disputing Comscore’s statistics with their own internal data.

All I know that is that it’s 2011, and it’s still really difficult to get not only accurate numbers for websites, but even seeing accurate trends is difficult. That’s just not right.

That being said, it does seem to open up some interesting possibilities since so much of display advertising is now powered with Adobe’s Flash technology, and that I imagine that Adobe is looking hard at the advertising business as a future growth area for their company.

However, I would’ve thought their move into advertising might have been through the creative/technology door they already had open with advertisers and agencies opposed to through a MAJOR web analytics acquisition. I won’t pretend to say I know if they’re making a mistake, but it will be interesting to watch how Adobe uses Omniture to become a larger internet player.

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Yahoo! Web Analytics is not open yet to everyone though, it’s available and free for search and display advertisers currently working with Yahoo!. In my opinion, and the opinion of others less biased such as CMS Watch, it’s a better enterprise product than Google Analytics.

The product is rolling out to various customer segments through the rest of year. It looks like Yahoo! Small Business merchants, advertisers making microsites, and developer partners will be the first to get access. I believe previoius IndexTools customers already have active accounts.

As an analytics nut, I must admit I’m ashamed to have not used it, although I did give IndexTools a test run before the Yahoo! acquisition. From my experience I felt like as a free product under Yahoo! it was a more powerful application than Google Analytics, so I think it will be well received in the analytics market.

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The sites appear to start to load until the Sitemeter tag is rendered, and then get an “Operation Aborted” error from Internet Explorer which then refreshes the site to a blank page.

Since many bloggers and web developers use Firefox or Safari, they may not initially notice this is occurring, but I’m sure there will be plenty of user complaints flooding their inboxes and blogs will begin to sound the alarm. Let’s hope Sitemeter rectifies it quickly.

Sitemeter’s basic service is free, and this may be a case of you get what you pay for, but it’s been a reliable analytics provider for years. This may be a prime example though of the damage that can occur when using a free web service and the impact it can have on a business. It’s unknown whether Sitemeter Premium users which pay for the analytics application are experiencing the same problem.

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As an overall web analytics fan, I’m always happy to see new sources of data, especially in the public website traffic field where the tools out there are all trying hard but still don’t quite deliver the goods. The players in the field are Comscore, Hitwise, Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and possibly some others I’m forgetting about at the moment. They all have some qualities I really like, but it’s hard to totally trust any of them yet.

So will Google Trends for Websites break away from the pack and finally be a tool we can trust? How does it stack up against the competition? Well, in my first few minutes of playing with the tool I came away with mixed feelings.

Positives

1. It’s another source of data, and different data from the competition. It’s the only one of the competitors in this field that can use the true Google search, analytics, and toolbar data.

2. Viewing trends over regions is cool and helpful. Andrew Chen wrote a cool post that compared Myspace to Facebook by country and mapped it against the largest ad markets to come to some interesting conclusions.

3. Seeing related sites is helpful to know what kind of neighborhood Google thinks a site is in, and it could be used to find sites in the link building process for your own site.

4. Seeing related searches is cool for your own site but also helpful to know what keywords your competitors are getting traffic on from Google.

Negatives

1. As expected, it appears that Google relies heavily on data from Google Analytics. If you’re a publisher using that tool you have more accurate data in the trend tool. If you’re not using it, the data gets poor. As an example here’s a graph of the traffic to Right Media’s website:

As you can see, the data essentially becomes non-existent in June 2007. I happen to know this is the exact time we stopped using Google Analytics as our web analytics tool because we were acquired by Yahoo!. It seems that Google no longer had enough data to track RightMedia.com. While not the highest traffic site in the world, Right Media gets enough traffic and is a well enough known company that you’d think through Google search and toolbar usage there would be some data to go on.

2. No data for smaller sites. For one, this blog shows no data in the Google Trends tool. I definitely know it gets traffic from Google, and I’m running Google Analytics. Wakeboarder.com, a site I used to own before selling a couple of years ago gets on the order of 3 million page views a month and uses Google Analytics and shows no data in Google Trends.

Hopefully they will continue to move down the tail and find a way to have data for sites like these. When the competitive tools do have data, it will mean Google Trends is useless unless you’re looking at huge sites.

3. Lack of accuracy. As Fred Wilson pointed out in a comparison of Comscore with Google Trends, he says that Comscore jives with the actual traffic statistics of his portfolio companies while Google Trends isn’t directionally correct. Ouch.

4. Google’s sites show no data. Mike Arrington theorizes this is because Google toolbar data would really skew these numbers, and he’s probably right. Although Google gave an excuse about it being as if they were giving interim financial guidance, which since it’s an estimate would not be true.

What is the answer?
If even the mighty Google can’t get it right using their massive amount of data, how can people get reliable traffic measurements and comparisons?

For the time being, I’d recommend using all the available services to provide a general view. If all of them show the same thing, it probably means it’s generally correct. If one service is off, take a look at how that service tracks data and see if that would explain it.

For the future, I like the sound of the stealth Mozilla data project that is rumored to use the Firefox browsing data to show traffic statistics. This would be a huge chunk of data, but also would have its own bias. It would give a boost to sites that skew towards Firefox users, and would cut out all Internet Explorer users (still the largest browser market), Opera users, and iPhone and Mac users using Safari.

Perhaps Microsoft could launch a service using Internet Explorer data? It’d be interesting to compare that to Firefox data.

I still like the idea that Quantcast has which is to use numerous data sources to estimate while also allowing publishers to get “certified” and put a Quantcast tracking tag on their actual website. This insures they will get the full set of traffic across browsers and users that hit that site. However, the big problem they have is that publishers have to know about this, agree to do it, and then suffer through the fact that anytime you add more javascript code to your site it has a performance hit on the speed.

Overall, we don’t have the answer yet, but at least Google is providing one more data source that we can all scratch our heads over until a true solution is discovered.

The beta invites are supposedly going out next month, sign up here if you’d like to get in line.

CrazyEgg
A really cool way to generate heatmaps of your site. Heat maps can be used for general information about where people are clicking, but can really be helpful for navigation changes and ad placement.

103Bees
103Bees is a cool way to see more about your natural search results and identify long tail phrases you may be able to expand more on to get more traffic, but it kind of feels like it’s just a subset of a web analytics application. There’s just not enough there that I want to use that much to keep me coming back to it.

MeasureMap
Like Clicky one of my favorite of the simpler analytics applications, but it never came out of alpha as Google bought it and ported a lot of the functonality and the team over to Google Analytics. I’m not sure if it should really be included on lists like this anymore since I don’t think they’re really giving out new accounts or continuing to develop it.

FeedBurner
The most comprehensive RSS analytics application that also provides numerous other features relating to feed management and monetization. It’s nice they also bought BlogBeat a while back and added in some nice basic web analytics to make it a “full” basic solution.

ClickTale
Like CrazyEgg a provider of heat maps, but different ones and with the recording of user sessions using your site. ClickTale has heat maps that show you how people scroll, and how they hover on links and for how long. They also allow you to record user sessions so you can actually watch users scroll and click around your site. Very interesting data.

MyBlogLog
There is a lot of functionality here beyond analytics, but MyBlogLog is also a good example of it being handy to use one piece of code to get good widget functionality, community, and analytics in one package.

The reason I like Quantcast is because they actually give publishers code to put on their site so you can actually send them real traffic data in which to rank your site accordingly and report interesting demographics and other information. As a publisher not only will you be ranked more accurately, but you can use the information to help pitch your site to advertisers.

Unfortunately the downfall of their system so far is that it requires publishers to actually take that action to install the code, and I think it’s always going to be an uphill battle to get enough of the web to do that to make their ranking system as accurate as it could be.

Either way, they’ve announced today that they’ve added the ability to add their code to Flash videos and widgets so that data is added to the mix as well. Instead of summarizing it all in my own words, here’s the highlights from their press release:

– Tabbed Quantified Publisher Profiles: Quantcast profiles will
always feature the popular summary view for each online property. But
now they include an enhanced traffic tab that provides greater depth
and insight on key audience reach, engagement and frequency metrics.

Key metrics, including unique visitors, visits and page-views, are
presented in dynamic daily, seven-day and trailing 30-day charts. In
addition, a traffic summary automatically calculates your average
visits per unique visitor and page views per visit. Coming soon, this
tab will include time-on-site metrics.

– The Quantified Publisher Network View: This new interface –
presently in beta – enables you to track your portfolio of properties
(websites, videos, widgets, etc.) in a single dashboard. It also gives
you one-click access and a single point of control for the Quantcast
profiles on all of your sites and services.

The Quantcast Network View features the new traffic tab with the same
easy-to-use dynamic charts to provide a rich overview of network
metrics. Unique visitors (“uniques”) are reported as unduplicated
network reach, and the other network metrics are shown in the
aggregate. It’s created when you quantify a second site or add a media
element. As always, you can adjust your settings to control which
elements the world can view.

– Secure Quantcast Measurement Tags: Paired with conventional
Quantcast measurement tags for content pages, new secure Quantcast
tags enable you to measure traffic to your transactional ‘https’ pages
with no interruption to check-out, and no affect on the shopping
experience.

I’ve mentioned it before, but Clicky is currently my favorite blog analytics solution. It isn’t as high-powered as a lot of solutions out there, but it has a very usable interface and some nice features not seen in other applications. What’s maybe the most impressive thing though is that Clicky is self-funded and built by just Sean as the programmer, and his partner who handles business matters. Great applications can be made by a small team!