Education is the cornerstone to sound decision-making, and as regular reader Judith Lowry has commented here, our community — for whatever reason — often can be “stubbornly backward.” I guess it’s why they published the “(blank) for Dummies” series of books.
Here’s an issue that comes up now and then when it comes to web analytics, as explained on Web Hosting Talk. The discussion — dubbed Alexa vs. Google — is here:
Question: “Hey,
I have more than one website. With one of the sites, the traffic exceeds the traffic of the other websites by much, according to Google Analytics. However, when I look at the Alexa ranking, that site falls far behind the other sites.
Is there any possible reason why this might happen?
Answer: “Traffic ranking websites are bogus; they only grab traffic from people who use their toolbar. Then they average that with how many people use the internet.
Response: “Oh, ok. That explains a bit. Always wondered, but never really looked into how they got their statistics.”
So now you know.
Filed under: Uncategorized
BTW, here’s a real-life example of the “Google v. Alexa” disparity: The latest report for GoNevadaCounty.com, provided on the county website. The results are tracked with Google analytics — not a “traffic ranking website” such as Alexa:
http://www.mynevadacounty.com/nc/bos/docs/Nevada%20County%20Economic%20Development%20and%20Tourism%20Marketing/GoNevadaCounty%20Website%20maintenance/April%20combined%20reports.pdf
As the county’s Friday Memo stated:
GoNevadaCounty.com Update
The success of the County’s tourism website, GoNevadaCounty.com, continues to grow. A new daily blog, with regularly refreshed content and photos, and collaboration with other tourism stakeholders have all contributed to more traffic being driven to and from the site. In its April report, Sierra Food/Wine/Art notes, “We continue to see an upward swing as new visitors are attracted to GoNevadaCounty.com and returning visitors check out what is new, up 388% over November 2011. [The number of total visitors was 754 in November and 2732 in March]. The number of pages being viewed has increased 462% since November 2011 [1,795 vs. 8082]. Pages per visit is holding steady at just under 3 pages per visit.” The SEO score, which measures how efficiently a website is generating visitors through the use of key search terms, was at 73% in November; an ideal score is at least 90. It is now holding steady at 92%. GoNevadaCounty.com’s Facebook page has also grown in popularity, from 59 “Likes” in November to 365 at this writing. The site is active with new posts daily by community groups, businesses and individuals adding their comments and announcements on the page.
During March 5-19, a radio promotion ran on Capital Public Radio that promoted Nevada County Arts and GoNevadaCounty.com. The campaign, which was a collaboration between the Nevada County Regional Chambers of Commerce and Nevada County Arts, resulted in a spike in web traffic at the onset of the campaign and then leveled off at a higher baseline. The Center for the Arts also reported higher ticket sales as a result of the campaign.
If you’re interested, you can keep track of all the county tourism and economic development initiatives here:
http://www.mynevadacounty.com/nc/bos/Pages/Economic-Development-and-Tourism-Marketing.aspx
Here’s a go figure for you. I own both http://www.yourlovelysmile.com and http://www.piracytipcash.com. I’ve owned yourlovely for several years now, and have had various misc stuff up there, mainly a private site for photography customers. I just recently dreamed up piracytipcash.com, bought the domain, and constructed a website. I was in a hurry when I got to the uploading process, and uploaded the whole http://www.piracytipcash.com to yourlovelysmile. I discovered my mistake, and reloaded it to the correct site.
That was about six weeks ago. I went to Google’s spot to get a new site cruised and indexed, but just for piracytipcash.com
Now, however, if you do a search for piracy, tip, and cash, you wind up at yourlovelysmile. Even if you dump in a bunch more terms into the search to narrow it down, Google still fails to find the correct site. Possibly because Google crawled yourlovely first, and concluded piracytipcash was just a copy? Damned if I know. Maybe the age of the domain name counts for a lot too.
Bing still misses both sites. Bing is worthless, IMHO.
Jeff, I see you’ve been added as a panelist to the NC Online Meetup at the Courtyard Suites in GV this coming Tuesday, 4/24/12, at 11 am. That made me change my RSVP from a “no” to a “yes.” I’m looking forward to it.
That’s great. Hope you can make it.
-Jeff