startup hustle

I often kept track of my competitors traffic movements using Alexa. When I started my internet marketing career, Alexa was the king of web traffic tracking. Then Compete came along, but I stayed with Alexa as that was the most used and excepted metric for web traffic.

As I was updating my weekly web traffic numbers (Alexa is weekly, Complete is monthly), I noticed some concerning issues. My rank in Alexa had been dropping for months, just a little each week. Since my traffic for the most part has been steady, I wasn’t super concerned. In the past few weeks my traffic has been great, actually breaking new records. Unfortunately my Alexa continued to drop, in roughly the same increments every week. Regardless if my traffic was steady or improving dramatically, Alexa did not seem to notice. If I can gain traffic and customers, while Alexa shows no change, are my competitors making swift movements unnoticed? Alexa is a ranking, not a solid metric like visits. A ranking is affected by many more variables than are in your control. It is best to compare yourself to others in your companies industry.

I started to track how Compete was handling the traffic changes. Compete has a few more helpful metrics. Other than the general Compete ranking that has all the same downfalls as Alexa, Compete also shows visitors and “people” (which I believe is uniques). These metrics are much more helpful because they give you an idea of the volume of visitors to a competitors site. These numbers are never perfect, but at least you have more control on the variables.

The compete ranking showed the recored breaking increase with only moderate gains. While this is a little aggravating, it is better than seeing the continual decrease reported in Alexa. Another concerning trend is all of the sites in this startups industry are falling in Alexa. Which means that either the industry as a whole is seeing less traffic, or other industries are surging in traffic or both.

At this point I am starting to lean toward Compete as a more complete tool for web traffic. Another Compete downfall is that it only updates monthly, where Alexa updates weekly (often more frequently). Which means if a competitor has a major traffic surge, I’m a month behind. On the other hand, Alexa does not seem to pick it up at all.

I recommend your track your closest competitors traffic numbers so you have an idea of where they are, where they are going and which you should be targeting.

(Disclaimer: Please remember that any and all traffic metric sites are far from perfect. You can use them in relation to other sites in your industry just to get a general idea of how you compare.)