Greg Sterling at Search Engine Journal points to Compete’s Snapshot, a new service offering Alexa like stats. From what I can gather the company compares itself more to comScore in it’s methodology, promoting the service as the “First premium web metrics tool made available for free”. The stats come from over 2 million users of the Compete Toolbar, so the data gathering is similar to Alexa’s, however they are primarily focused on the US market, where as Alexa looks at traffic worldwide.
Question is I guess: are the figures any good?
My gut feeling after plonking in a few sites is that they are as nearly as good as Alexa’s figures, with the proviso that Alexa’s figures are at best questionable. You get the visitor figures for a month, not daily like Alexa, but the actual data itself is fairly rich including uniques, a rank, page views per visit and time spent on the site. However despite the service playing up it’s advantages over Alexa in the FAQ, I don’t think it’s anywhere near being an Alexa killer yet. People like the up to date stats in Alexa where as monthly stats from Snapshot are sort of nice, but certainly isn’t going to drive demand to the site when you see the same figures for the whole month. And yet, competition is always healthy, so best of luck to the team at Snapshot.
I put cellounge.com in there and it said in the last year I have had 3000+ visitors. Its completely inaccurate, I sometimes get that in a day. 78% of my visitors every day are new visitors according to google analytics. They suck!
I’ve found their numbers to be very in line with Comscore, which is lower than everyone likes but actually what real businesses and media use. Like Comscore, because of their sample size the less traffic you get the more inaccurate it’ll be, but for larger sites it is pretty spot-on, for US traffic at least.