According to Compete, Andy Beard’s Niche Marketing blog traffic was up 2290% in July and rocketed past that of Darren Rowse’s Problogger.
Evidently, Jason Calacanis and John Chow have also grown stupendously.
Hey, I want a 2290% boost in traffic too. I better ask the three of them for tips!
Or maybe not. After all, neither Andy nor Jason’s Alexa ranking has budged. John’s has gone up a bit lately- maybe because he overcame the ill-effects of the Google ban.
Real? Or Toolbar?
Well, it’s remotely possible both traffic ranking companies are right. After all, Compete measures the number of unique montly visitors and and Alexa measures daily visitors. And Compete estimates US traffic while Alexa estimates worldwide traffic.
But why do I think the difference is due to differential adoption of the toolbars both services use to measure traffic? (Maybe Andy can shed some light on this?)
Update:
Andy thinks this might be due to his encouraging people to use the Compete search tool. Evidently so did Dave Airey. But Tricia’s traffic jumped to. Here are five sites all showing traffic jumping by at least a factor of 3 and as much as a factor of 23!
I’m sure LordMatt is right the same thing affected all these blogs Compete ranks. Toolbar? Fix in Competes algorithm? Whatever it was, it affected Niche Marketing,, Feverish Thought, Dosh Dosh, David Airey and, possibly, Lord Matt
I compared Andy’s traffic to mine on compete and mine was slightly higher from November to June but then he had a big spike. I’ve apparently only had a 329% increase for the month of July (even though I know my real stats tell me my traffic was down in July and August), however I do have a 21768.5% for the year! LOL
Yes I wonder if Andy is using the compete plugin? That might account for the huge spike for July on compete.
DoshDosh went up high as well
Don’t forget that Compete is toolbar based and I tend to encourage use of the Search Status plugin for Firefox.
Maybe they fixed a bug?
I have managed to keep traffic fairly stable over the summer whilst growing subscribers a little, but there haven’t been any major spikes
I’d bet that the correlation co-efficient of those blogs that spiked is near to 1. Or in terms that the average guy or gal can understand I reckon they all jumped for the same reason. It’s not traffic so it must be some other score based part. Adoption is unlikely as that is not an “organic” or poisson style random-continuous change but more in line with a sudden shift - a single discrete change. This points to a sample source change.
That sample source change might be to include EU readers (which would explain things somewhat) or some other sampling change such as a release of otherwise blocked data sources into the sample population.
The other option would be a representative conversion for comparative analysis. Such as scaling values from EU sources so they can be compared to US sources based on the effect of a lower population sample from the EU data set.
Hope that was not too technical (I can do that sometimes and I annoy people). Feel free to ask me to say that again but in English.
Here is your proof
The other site where I have encouraged the use of the Search Status toolbar a little is David Airey’s design blog.
Compete of Doshdosh, David Airey and Andy Beard