startup hustle

In my never-ending quest for more web data, I have added Quantcast to my arsenal. Quantcast is a mix of traffic rankings and analytics that gives you an additional data point when researching competitor movements and shifts in traffic segments.

I prefer to use multiple data points when calculating both traffic for my sites and competitor sites. There are not many options that provide realistic data when comparing site traffic. Alexa.com and Compete.com are the two “best” options for traffic rankings currently. Compete also gives you an estimated number of visitors, as does Quantcast. You will notice large deviations in the data for some sites, but that is expected as traffic estimation is difficult.

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After I wrote about my frustration with Alexa, they did a major algorithm change that rendered my post less relevant. The rant was about Alexa’s lack of calculating major traffic shifts with a couple of sites I work on. Compete on the other hand did recognize the traffic increases.

Alexa made major updates to the way they calculate rankings by including more data then just the toolbar. While many sites were complaining about ranks dropping, Startup Hustle jumped almost 100,000 positions from 271,000 to 178,000. Two other sites that I spend a majority of my time marketing saw increases as well.

While I keep a record of all major competitors and their rankings, the only rank I really question was yCombinator.com. The home of YC News only has an Alexa ranking of 77,000, which seems rather low considering their rank before the algorithm change and Compete numbers.

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.

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A trend I am starting to see among young internet entrepreneurs as well as more established startups is a lack of understanding how customers use the internet to research and buy. This information is more basic than understanding your target customers, it is common consumer processes.

There are many reports written on how consumers use the internet to buy products and services. Its not new information, but hardly any of us (us = startups and entrepreneurs) use that knowledge to our benefit. I recently sat in a meeting with a colleague to help weed issues in his startup marketing plan. Before the meeting, someone was mentioning the new purchases they had made on the internet. The amount of research this individual conducted was what you would expect from a twenty-something that is internet savvy. This startup didn’t build a product under the assumption that their customers would do the same product research. They did not do it on purpose, they just didn’t put themselves in the consumers shoes.

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