Does TrafficEstimate.com provide accurate traffic statistics?

[sr2303]

When comparing traffic data for my own sites and others, I see very large discrepancies between Google Analytics, Google AdPlanner, Compete, TrafficEstimate.com - TrafficEstimate.com used to be a great way to get data on other websites' traffic, but now they don't seem to show data for international sites, and the data matches very closely to other sources for some sites and not close at all for others (200% differences).

Does anybody have experience with the accuracy of TrafficEstimate.com?

Does anybody have experience with the accuracy of Google AdPlanner traffic data?

[seo-mojo]

Hi Jeffrey,

We own and operate TrafficEstimate.com and can provide a little more insight into how it works.

We built an algorithm that attempts to estimate traffic based on various criteria. We calibrate the algorithm based on traffic from real websites, many of which we own and operate, and some that are owned by people that we are friendly with. It's hard to get the algorithm to match the exact traffic number for each of these sites, but we do get it close (often within 10% to 20%).

Like any estimating tool, TrafficEstimate.com tends to work best for larger sites. That's not to say you need millions of visitors, but for sites that have less than 20,000 visitors per month, it's really hard to be accurate, for any estimating tool.

In checking our own sites, it does appear to be running on the low side, so I'll have our team update it to get it to be more accurate, at least for our own sites. Hopefully that will translate into better results for you too.

If you (or anyone else) would like to share specific website/traffic data with me to help us calibrate it, feel free to reach out to me via private message (click on my profile). I promise that I'll keep all information confidential.

One final note about the sites we cover, we do track historical traffic (to provide year-over-year trending) for a large number of sites, but we don't cover all sites. We will work on adding the ability to get the current traffic estimate for any site, even if we don't cover it on an ongoing basis.

-Doug

[anthonydnelson]

I just spot checked a few domains I work on with TrafficEstimate.com and I would say that the website is not very accurate with their estimates.

I have not used Google AdPlanner.