Working in digital marketing, and particularly search marketing, I’m always very interested in tracking exactly how well a campaign is working. It’s why the first thing that we always do when we start work with a client is to get access to their analytics, or install some of our own if there aren’t any. However businesses often seem more concerned with how they’re doing relative to their competition than they are with their own performance.

This struck me after I was reading a blog today which claimed to be one of the most popular in the world according to Technorati. Whilst I knew that it was a popular blog in its sector I was surprised that it could really be one of the most popular in the world. However, on going to Technorati and checking their Top 100, there it was. I decided to see how this particular blog was doing according to other free stats/analytics services, and checked it on Compete against the site ranking directly below it on Technorati’s list.

I’ve blurred out the names of the blogs involved as this post isn’t meant to be about their popularity, rather the reliability of free, external facing analytical tools: suffice to say, the blog that Technorati believe was more popular is the one represented by the blue line. I then thought that I’d check on another free service, Alexa.

Again, the site that Technorati had as more popular is the one represented by the lower line (in this case, one that can barely be seen). So what’s going on here?

Well, it’s quite simple. Essentially all these tools have different methods of measuring popularity, and they are all limited by the fact that they don’t have access to the true traffic figures. So Technorati essentially looks at how many links are directed at a blog, Alexa basically tracks visits from users who have downloaded its toolbar whilst Compete tracks the web-history of a large user panel. None of them actually have access to the back-end data which is the only real way of measuring success.

Now it may seem strange to use results from two less than perfect services to disprove the results ofanother less than perfect service. But the fact that the blog that started this bit of investigation off is related to search marketing and social media (and therefore is quite likely to be more linked to than a more consumer focussed one, due to the type of readers it attracts) means that I think in this case the Compete data is probably slightly more reliable.

But at the end of the day, unless you’re running a business which operates on an advertising based model where you have to prove that your site attracts more traffic than the competition (in which case you should probably be signed up to ABCe or some other organisation that audits all sites equally) then you should really be concentrating more on how succesful your site is rather than how you (appear to) measure up against the competition.

Header image: wadeferd on flickr

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