Webmetrics for beginners
Posted by sandnsurf on October 2008
I am amazed at the amount of information out in the cybersphere pertaining to page rank, reach, traffic, unique page views, visitors, analytics and webmetrics. It feels like a bit of a jungle.
Having recently started a couple of blogs and a website, I have been intrigued by the facts and figures involved in analyzing traffic and reach and the factors which affect them.
Page Rank - Googles little green bar – has caused much controversy over the years and is not currently integrated into the Chrome Browser, yet it causes great excitement as each update arrives. Check out the latest download of the Page Rank Toolbar from Google and see what all the fuss is about. Certainly everybody gets excited with each ‘new leak’ of the PageRank algorithm but whether the algorithm needs to be cracked, or your pages stuffed with keywords…who cares – just write what you want to write – and enjoy writing for the sake of writing and readers will follow.
Google analytics gives a pretty good representation of the traffic your site receives, the geographical area, the referring sites, the trend in visits, most popular pages, browsers used and screen resolutions used – and also allow you to view where people enter the site from and where they exit from. This can certainly give valuable information to startups trying to refine the look and feel of their site. Great recent article from Alt Search Engines helps further define traffic patters using analytics.
Additional Sites which will provide you with site tracking in return for meta-tags include Omniture, and SiteTracker (have to read the great sitetracker blog)
WebMetrics can reveal alarming trends including the astounding fact that ‘Facebook is now more popular than sex‘ – but still not convinced I really know what all the numbers mean. Combinations of webmetric data (compete, technorati, quantcast, alexa etc) are combined with complex algorithms to determine top rating sites.
For a simpler overview of my favorite sites, to watch the traffic trends, catch the ‘buzz’ or play with algorithms (only once all the paint has dried!) – I really enjoy using the following sites (in no particular order)
CubeStat.com: Simple and efficient way of reviewing the Alexa, Quantcast and Compete ranking scores for a web domain. Cubestat also gives information on Page Rank, Dmoz listing and documents the number of Google/Live/Yahoo indexed pages and backlinks for a site.
Alexa.com : Users in the community download toolbars to IE or Firefox and their web movements are monitored to calculate valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not. These traffic toolbars are unfortunately prone to some degree of browser slowdown with time. However the site itself displays the traffic rankings for websites in the global sphere as well as individual top 100 for each country. I love the direct comparison tool to review the reach of multiple sites at the same time.
Compete.com : Triangulates multiple data sources, including ISP, Panel & Toolbar to estimate U.S. traffic. Nice clean cut site with the ability to perform and save site analysis reviews. Within search fields you are able to review site ‘engagement’, reach, ranking, unique visitors and growth. Free to register (as long as you don’t forget the ridiculous password they send you)
Quantcast.com - founded by a team of engineers and mathematicians in 2005. Much more orientate at advertisers, publishers and the digital media industry – aimed at combining directly measured audience data with panel-based estimates to deliver accurate third-party metrics and easy-to-read profiles on digital media properties.
