Compete, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Quantcast: Whose Internet Traffic Data Can You Believe?
By Anna Johnson on May 27th, 2010We quote a lot of Internet traffic data statistics in Kikabink News. Since we get these statistics from different companies – e.g. Compete, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Quantcast and others – each of which uses a different methodology to arrive at its findings, it’s almost inevitable there will be inconsistencies between the various findings.
For example, according to comScore, Google’s U.S. search engine market share was 64.4 percent in April 2010. Yet, Hitwise said Google’s U.S. search engine market share was 71.4 percent. comScore had Yahoo and Bing growing their share during the period, whilst Hitwise said Yahoo and Bing both lost share between March and April.
As one of our loyal readers rightly asked after we published comScore’s findings: who’s right?
The answer is that each company provides estimates, at best. Even Google Analytics and companies like Quantcast, both of which attempt to record a website’s actual traffic (based on placing code on each webpage to record visitors) cannot distinguish between real people and say, web robots.
When it comes to estimating something like search engine market share – based on how many Internet users use a particular search engine – a research company can’t really do anything more than derive its findings from a sample of Internet users.
Put it this way: Google, Yahoo and Bing may know how many people are using their services, but they aren’t about to share that data with the world. Only Google provides some indication of its traffic via Google Trends, but that is far from the kind of search engine market share data most of us want to see.
Okay, so Compete, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen, etc base their traffic findings on estimates. That begs the next question: whose data is the most accurate?
Well, there is no hard and fast answer here, because it depends on what YOU consider to be most reliable. So, let me present a summary of each company’s methodology for estimating Internet traffic, a link to their site for more information, and leave it to you decide which you regard as the most credible.
1. Compete
Compete surveys a panel of over 2 million U.S. Internet users.
2. comScore
comScore surveys a panel of approximately 2 million Internet users worldwide.
3. Hitwise
Hitwise uses web logs from a select group of Internet Service Providers (ISP) as well as a panel of 25 million people worldwide (10 million in the U.S.).
4. Nielsen
Nielsen analyzes more than 30,000 websites and surveys a panel of over 230,000 people in the U.S.
5. Quantcast
Quantcast measures actual traffic to a website by implementing a software script on each page of the website and supplements this with data from market research companies, ISPs and toolbar vendors, covering over 2 million individuals (1.5 million in the U.S.).
May 28th, 2010 at 4:24 am
A well researched and written article Anna. It will suprise a few people. Doug