I’m sharp, witty, and I consider myself to be an educated woman — but I’m not wicked-smart when it comes to science, math, or computers & shit. I know that the sky is blue and that the sun rises in the east. I know that google runs on an algorithm; however, don’t ask me for the technical explanations of blue skies or algorithms. If I could do math or science, I wouldn’t be in Human Resources.
So I was pleased to read Joel Cheesman’s tweet about a funky little tool called Compete. I always wondered how it was possible for other people to talk about my site’s traffic — and now I know the secret.
I also know your site’s traffic, too.
I’m not sure that Compete is a perfect tool, but I’m not smart enough to recognize the perfect tool (unless it’s Spencer Pratt). I use WordPress.com, and I have very little control over my domain and I can’t install Google Analytics — although I think WordPress.com already uses Google Analytics and provides a report to me. My statistics seem comprehensive — but I’m never sure about the validity of the data. This is especially true since changing my domain name.
Now I have another internet measurement tool to use thanks to Joel Cheesman — but I wonder if Compete is awesome enough to measure how much tequila is too much to put into my Friday evening margarita?!
It is physically impossible to add too much Tequila to a Margarita unless you overflow the glass. That is “too much”!
Another one I use is Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com). I get a variety of stats, even which countries are reading my blog (Yeah Thailand).
What’s odd is on Quantcast, my site enough data and your site doesn’t, but on Compete, your site has data, while mine is not. Funny way the internet counts people.
Oh by the way, it seems a lot of people are into the Billy Mays Health Insurance Plan and they really want to know a lot more, according to Compete. So, we want more stories about Billy Mays.
@michael That’s my kind of margarita!
@TracyTran I’ll take a look at Quantcast — it’s funny because I’m sure there are thousands of tools out there. I wonder why I haven’t been paying attention? It’s like when you buy a new car — suddenly, everyone else is driving that SAME EXACT CAR.
First of all, if you can see my stats, I feel completely naked.
I can’t see mine on compete since I don’t have the blogger domain all to myself.
Ms Pink Slip, I’m really surprised that you don’t own blogger. I thought you were big time?
In regards to my site, Compete is more accurate that Quantcast, but both are way off (they need to aim higher).
I’ve been using Google Trends for Websites (http://trends.google.com/websites), which requires about 2k unique visitors a day to register anything, but I think it seems pretty good. The fact that it comes from Google is a good reason to have confidence in it too.
I like Quantcast, because a good number of sites actually install the Quantcast code and have their real stats published. For instance, you can see Cheezhead’s real stats on Quantcast. You can tell, because it doesn’t say “estimated people.”
Being a voyeur is fun, isn’t it?
@willy being a voyeur is so fun. WP says that I had 17,000+ page views in July, but Compete has much lower numbers. I would suspect that they’re much more discriminating about how they track the data (viewers v. clicks or whatevs) but I don’t have the time or the patience to really delve into the methodology. I will take a look at Google trends, though. I’m just nosy!!!
Laurie,
Pageviews and Unique visitors are different. Compete is showing UVs, while WP probably tells you UVs and PVs.
If I come to your site, I’m one unique visitor. If I look at 10 pages, then I have 10 pageviews.
If I visit your site on two different computers, then I’m probably 2 unique visitors - although it can get tricky. Basically, unique visitors are evaluated based on cookies (little data nuggets that sites leave on your computer every time you visit and that tell the sites information about you) and IP addresses (everything that connects to the Internet has an IP address - it’s kind of like a phone number, but you can’t call it like one). Unique visitors also depends on the period. If I had 100 unique visitors today, and 100 unique visitors yesterday, my total unique visitors for the past 2 days is somewhere between 100 and 200 depending on how many of the 100 unique visitors for the second day were repeat visitors. So annual, monthly, and daily unique visitors aren’t derived directly from each other.
Pageviews are registered every time a new URL is loaded.
Strict definitions of unique visitors and pageviews (to a lesser extent) vary depending on which analytics program you use, but typically what I described above is how they do it.
In short, you can never have more unique visitors than you have pageviews, but 99.9999999999999% of the time will have more pageviews than unique visitors.
Web analytics is fun, and it should be in the repertoire of any and every HR pro who does recruiting (since who does recruiting without using the Internet at least a little bit these days?).
Oh yeah, and WordPress’ statistics are the right ones. Compete’s are just estimates based on a certain methodology.
Can you tell that I’m a stats junkie?
Holy crap, Willy, you are a junkie and you are awesome. I need to beef up my technical skillz so I can be a better HR pro. Srsly. I’m such an amateur, sometimes.
I looked at your page code and you do in fact have google analytics installed. In my opinion it is by the best stat tracker out and gives tons of data. Compete and quantcast are rather incomplete.
I do not work with wordpress so I am not familiar with it. But you should be able to access the analytics data, you will need to have a google account of some type (i.e. gmail) and go here http://www.google.com/analytics/
to see if you can find the data they are tracking on your site.
You may want to check out some of the bigger webmaster sites (webmaster world, digitalpoint) where you can ask people that actually use wordpress how to get to your data.