When you search the web, you might find a really awesome website. Many people might judge that website depending on the number of visits that it receives on a daily/weekly/monthly basis but how do you find out information like that?
Well here are some web site traffic tracking websites that can tell you what you need to know.
(Note, these are not web services for tracking traffic on your website. These websites basically estimate the traffic levels of other websites based on a number of publicly available factors. For tracking traffic on your website refer to free traffic analytics tools.)
Google Adplanner
I think that Google AdPlanner should be your first stop to check out any stats about a particular website. As it is mainly for advertisers looking at website statistics to see if it is worthwhile to advertise on a particular site, this makes it a great option to get accurate and reliable data.
Face it, what doesn’t Google know? They have data on nearly every website but that is another issue. As you can see from the stats for MakeUseOf, anyone can tell how many visits we get and what type of people regularly read us. It is also good as you can select to show data from one particular country.
Alexa
Alexa is another popular web site traffic tracking site and it is owned by Amazon. Although it involves a lot of clicking to get your results, it has proven to be useful. As you can see by the image, you have a lot of stats that you can browse through.
Compete
Compete is another great website to see how many visitors go to a website. However, there are a lot of limitations if you do not have a pro account. But apart from that, you can save the graph as an image. Overall, if you want a nice graph of a website’s growth (or decline) Compete is a nice option.
BizInformation
Biz Information is a great website as not only does it provide you with a graph of unique website visitors (from Compete) but it also tells you how much it is worth (although I don’t know how accurate it is).
The other good thing about Biz Information is that it also tells you how many submissions it has in popular social networking websites such as Digg and Stumbleupon.
So do you think the owners of MUO will sell for that price? With nearly 100,000 subscribers, who knows?
Quantcast
With Quantcast, you have a few options to play with. You can change the graph to show by day, week, month and to select a range of dates to show from one week to all time. Another great thing about Quantcast is that it shows you the US demographics of visitors such as age, sex, income, children and education level. But I would think Google Adplanner would be better.
URL Trends
URL Trends has a nice user interface and well placed ads, so be careful what you are clicking. But the web site traffic tracking that they provide is good. As you can see from the image, it shows where users are coming from, and you can find more details as you read from the “˜report navigation’ links. If you have a paid subscription, you can download your report in a PDF format.
Which tracking tools do you use to look for visitor stats for websites you find? Let us know in the comments.