Sizing Up the Competition
You’re looking at graph of our web traffic compared with that of other universities in this region. I’m not a huge fan of Alexa, but today I just found out you can generate these comparison charts. Short of getting access to the server logs or analytics of rival institutions, this is pretty telling.
Several thoughts about this graph:
- Isn’t it interesting how these university websites have a similar pulse?
- I’d like to know more about the Alexa’s formula for “reach”.
- Let’s pretend I had a google analytics data for the other three sites. How close would Alexa’s data match up?
Drew…really interesting stuff here with the Alexa comparison. Also enjoyed reading your “10 Reasons” piece.
It appears that the December/January dip that hits all of us during the holiday break is impacting these sites…
My guess is that the “pulse” for all the sites would be similar in Google Analytics, even if the numbers were dramatically different than Alexa’s.
You might also want to check out Compete and Quantcast as you can get this similar data from them too. What’s nice about Alexa is after there recent changes last week this data has the promise to be much more accurate that previously.
Also if you use netvibes you can pull a widget that is essentially a chart similar to what your looking at directly into your netvibes account. Really cool!
How close does Alexa match your own logs? That might give you an inkling of how close it matches the others.