The most untrusted analytics service: Alexa! But can the marketers and site owners stop living in the past?

Alexa! One traffic analytics website every novice (In the field of Digital Marketing) keeps talking about in Kenya. I have even come across some major site owners and media personalities who never waste an opportunity of giving Alexa as a reference to boast about their site ranking. But the question is how many actual marketers (Intelligent ones) out there actually trust a site like Alexa whose whole model is based on the number of 'toolbar' downloads.

To start with, Alexa doesn't talk anything about Unique Visitors on your site and the ranking of your site heavily depends on the number of Alexa toolbars downloaded in this country.

There was a time when Alexa was used heavily and the trust level was a bit fine because there were hardly any 'FREE' tools available but that was the Jurassic Era when the earth was ruled by Dinosaurs. Now there are much more reliable and trust worthy analytic services available like ComScore, Google Trends, Google Ad planner etc.

Let's do a comparative analysis of the traffic numbers from these different services-

1.) Google Trends

Google Trends gives you an indicative traffic report based on the number of searches made on its search website. Interestingly enough following are the results when we compared Nation,Standard Media, CapitalFM, DealFish and the Business Daily website.

 Now as you can see, Nation is the undisputed leader of the lot, while Standard media follows behind with a decent gap. However the 3rd site amongst these sites is Business Daily. DealFish and CapitalFM are almost negligible.

2.) Alexa Rankings

Now let's compare the same websites on Alexa. Alexa ranks these sites as following in Kenya:-

www.nation.co.ke - Rank 9th (The only East African site in the top 10)
www.dealfish.co.ke - Rank 12th (Ok, you guys can laugh out loud on this)
www.standardmedia.co.ke - Rank 15th
www.capitalFM.co.ke - Rank 16th (There was a time when this site was right behind Nation on Alexa but it seems most of the Capital FM employees have upgraded their browsers and do not have the Alexa toolbars anymore)
www.businessdailyafrica.com - Rank 30th (Whoa!! The no 3 site in the lot as per Google Trends is no 30 here)

3.) Google Ad Planner

Now coming to one of the most trusted analytical tool used by the marketers and media buyers across the globe which is Google Ad Planner. You can access this site at http://Google.com/Adplanner and do the comparison on your own.

According to the Google Ad Planner, the traffic on our sample sites are as follows- (For the month of October)

1.) www.nation.co.ke - 38 MILLION Page views
2.) www.standardmedia.co.ke - 15 Million Page views
3.) www.dealfish.co.ke - 2.6 Million Page views
4.) www.businessdailyafrica.com - 1.6 Million Page views
5.) www.capitalfm.co.ke - 840,000 Page views

Nation, as you see clearly leads the online business with a MASSIVE 38 Million pageviews every month and Dealfish which according to Alexa is no 2 hangs around with only 2.6 Million page views a month. Business Daily which according to Alexa is no 30 has almost double the traffic than Capital FM which stands at no 16 on the Alexa rankings.

4.) ComScore

Unfortunately the Comscore data is ONLY available for the www.nation.co.ke website and no other Kenyan site appears on their list therefore its not possible to do any analysis using this service. However according to Comscore, Nation gets around 4.3 Million Unique visitors every month.

The question is open to all of you out there as to which service do you trust more? Is it Google Trends (Search based comparison) or Google ad planner (Highly polished tracking based analytics) or an age old clumsy software aka Alexa?