Website rankings – Who’s on first, What’s on second and Where’s my site?

Written August 1st, 2007 by Ed Bennett

Ranking lists have always been popular. The Billboard Top 100, The New York Times Best-Sellers Lists, and the Dave Letterman Top 10 List are just a few examples. It’s no surprise that after the Web took off in the mid-90’s, Web popularity tools came along that claimed to rank websites by traffic.

The most popular service was Alexa, which gathered data by offering a toolbar for Internet Explorer. Released in 1997, this toolbar offered functionality missing in early versions of IE, and was installed by hundreds of thousands of people across the Internet. In exchange for the extra features, the software tracked websites visited by the users and reported this information back to Alexa.

The quality of their data has always been criticized – just do a Google search on “alexa accuracy” for hundreds of articles on this topic. The primary problem is with low-traffic sites, which are the majority of sites out there. There’s just not enough sample data coming in for an accurate ranking.

In the past few years, competitors have appeared who use more advanced techniques for data gathering and analysis. The two services getting the most attention are Compete.com and Quantcast.com. Other services include Ranking.com and Netcraft.com

Last year I decided to research these services in more detail. Using the 170 hospital websites listed in U.S. News and World Report as a starting point, I tracked the rankings for each hospital across all five services. There’s still a noise issue. The top 20 sites were pretty consistent across all services, but it gets more jumbled once you get down to sites with 100,000 monthly visitors or less.

Despite this, one service stood out. Quantcast.com in particular had accurate numbers for all of my websites, even ones that only get a few thousand visitors a month (See this example). Their data gathering combines panel measurement, along with raw ISP traffic logs from major service providers. (think Comcast, Verizon, etc.)

Spot checks with the Web managers of a few dozen sites on the list confirmed that the Quantcast numbers were pretty close – usually within 25% of the actual number. They also offer additional demographic data on site visitors, which makes it a good market research tool.

I continue to track hospital site rankings, and have expanded the list to include some of the large commercial and government medical sites. Now, however, the data comes from Quantcast alone.

Here are links to the data:

US News hospital sites – rankings from five services

US News hospital sites – Quantcast unique US Visitor numbers

(please note, this list was built from the 2006 US News Best Hospitals list, and the visitor numbers were checked back in April. These numbers are updated each month, so current stats may be slightly different. An update using the 2007 US News hospitals will be done shortly.)

Here are a few ways this data could be useful to you:

Ranking:

  • How does your website compare to others in your market area?
  • How are you doing against similar organizations across the country?

Demographics like age, gender, ethnicity, income, and education.

  • What is the demographic make-up of your audience?
  • Do the demographics change across different domains under your control?
  • How does your audience compare to other hospitals?

Similar Audiences. This section lists other sites your audience is likely to visit. This could be a good source for reciprocal links.

How would you use this information?

-By: Ed Bennett

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 4:16 am and is filed under Ed Bennett, marketing, rankings, research, statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

All comments processed with Textile, the Humane Web Text Generator. Learn more.

10 Responses to “Website rankings – Who’s on first, What’s on second and Where’s my site?”

  1. Ed Bennett Says:
    August 1st, 2007 at 5:07 am

    Here are some additional articles on Web measurement:

    Media Shift – The Problem with Web Measurement
    http://tinyurl.com/2jmvp3

    Antezeta – Web Statistics for Internet Market Research
    Part 1 – http://tinyurl.com/3xbd74
    Part 2 – http://tinyurl.com/38ojzu

  2. Krista Thomas Says:
    August 1st, 2007 at 11:28 am

    Hi Ed — Krista from Quantcast here. Thanks so much for using our service.

    I just wanted to clarify that our model is unique in that we enable publishers to participate, bringing direct measurement into the traditional ISP panel-based mix.

    Free of charge, we invite sites to join our Quantified Publisher Program and add lightweight measurement pixels to their pages to enable us to directly measure their actual traffic.

    This is a surefire way to get more accurate third-party metrics and it also enables publishers to control their profiles on Quantcast.com

    Thanks,
    -Krista

  3. Ed Bennett Says:
    August 1st, 2007 at 12:43 pm

    Krista,

    Thanks for checking in. Have you considered adding a Health category to the Quantcast site types? Quantcast currently lists site groups like Teen, Clothing, Auto, Business, Retail, Sports, etc.

    Certainly Health is a large enough segment to merit it’s own category.

    Thanks,

    Ed

  4. Krista Thomas Says:
    August 1st, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    Hi Ed — thanks for the suggestion. We are indeed working on a Health and Wellness category for our Siteographics. If you are willing to share the list of top sites from your aforementioned research, that would be great, as we are working to build a comprehensive base.

    Best,
    -Krista

  5. Ed Bennett Says:
    August 1st, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    Krista,

    Please send me an email at ebennett@umm.edu or call me at 410-328-0771. I have some good lists you can use.

    thanks,,

    Ed

  6. Pamela Landis Says:
    August 2nd, 2007 at 3:41 pm

    Hi Ed – Is there a way for us to create custom reports like this for two URLs? I operate two pretty big ones that direct to one site….Or does the service account for that? Pam

  7. Ed Bennett Says:
    August 2nd, 2007 at 5:37 pm

    Pam,

    There is a way, but it you need to add some code to your pages. As Krista mentioned, they let encourage publishers (that’s us) to become “Quantified”. You sign up, then generate a few lines a javascript code, which you add to the footer of your pages. This sends data back to them, which makes your reports much more accurate. I have have two javascripts on our pages – which send data to Quantcast and Google Analytics.

    Once this is in place, and if you do it for more than one domain – then you can see a roll up report. I’ve done this for two of my sites and plan to do the rest in the next few weeks.

    Here are the two domains:

    http://www.quantcast.com/umm.edu

    http://www.quantcast.com/umgcc.org

    and here is my roll-up report:

    http://www.quantcast.com/p-cdNh2QkM4ZZqE

    This will not give you a combined ranking number, but that’s not too hard to figure out.

    hope this helps…

    Ed

  8. Neal Linkon Says:
    August 3rd, 2007 at 10:54 am

    However useful the numbers may be for comparison purposes, they aren’t even close for our site. But it’s interesting reading, that’s for sure! Thanks for sharing those.

  9. Ed Bennett Says:
    August 3rd, 2007 at 12:31 pm

    Neal,

    This is exactly the kind of feedback I hoped to generate. I’d like to get a better understanding about how your numbers differ.

    Could you give me a call? 410-328-0771

    Thanks,

    Ed

  10. brockdil Says:
    August 9th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    I have a similar comment as Neal’s, as our numbers appeared on that list about 1/4 of what our WebTrends reports are suggesting.

Leave a Reply