A fellow blogger brought to my attention the other day and mentioned “Wow, how many visitors are you getting daily? Compete.com says you’re getting over 16,000 unique visitors a month!”
Well, all I can say is, Compete is inaccurate, almost reminds me of Alexa ratings, but let’s save that conversation for another day.
Now, don’t get my wrong, I can lie and tell people I am getting 16,000 unique visitors a month but I’m not like that. But having this discussion got me curious, especially since I haven’t checked my monthly visitors for a couple weeks. So, this almost forced me to check out how I did for the past month.
Although it’s not as good as I want, I’m making progress and it’s more than the previous month, which is always a good thing. I think I’m getting about 7,000+ unique visitors which isn’t bad, especially since it’s a little more than last month AND people are spending more time on my site reading. So, the quality is getting better as well.
But let’s get back to Compete’s inaccuracy.
So, I took a couple of screenshots which you guys can take a look at. The first is a screenshot of DatMoney.com stats from Compete.com and the second is a screenshot of Mybloglog stats.
I went with Mybloglog stats because I feel those are the closest one to my average of the three stat tracking I use. And as you can see with the screenshot, I ended up with about 7,100 unique visitors within the past month compared to the 16,000 Compete.com was telling me I was getting.
I’m not sure how many of you guys use Compete.com, but if you do, I wouldn’t really rely on it too heavily. I mean, you can say the same thing for Alexa.com… I know some people who have around the same Alexa rating but one of the two gets twice as many visitors daily.
But again, let’s not get into Alexa, we’ll save that for another day!
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Great info Jay. I just checked my blog and it told me “no data”. I guess I have some work to do.
I have heard the same about both Compete and Alexa. Both are inaccurate because they are add-ons or pollers. Your best bet is to use something on your site that counts every visitor and has analysis for you, like Google analytics. There are several others as well.
I like Alexa. But you are correct, it has to be inaccurate because people gotta add it onto their browser…
Good call both Compete and Alexa are useless
If you want to do a funny experiment with Alexa take a site then setup a link exchange, and you alexa ranking will go way up. The reason will be the highest percentage of people that have the toolbar installed are Indian link builders 
Nice post. Have to agree with you on this, except Compete has worked in the opposite direction for me. For the last two months it seems to be stating I have less visitors (sometimes as much as 2000 less) than I believe I actually have. Go figure.
Yep Jay, Compete.com really is inaccurate. I’ve just checked my blog’s statistics and was showing me that I got around 15,000 visitors to it until yesterday ( when I did the check up )..which is not true, of course. So, Compete isn’t the tool you need to rely on, for analyzing your traffic stats..As others mentioned here, there are better services out there, which are quite good and useful and will show you the true numbers:)
Cheers
Midwest
http://www.myppcadvertising.info
I use Compete and Alexa and have found that they are both inaccurate. I use mint and google analytics to track my visitors. According to compete I had 6,000 visitors last month. I actually had over 20,000 uniques. Go figure that if someone decided to look at that data over just asking me for it my site would look like it wasn’t as successful as it is.