A Tool To Help You Estimate Your Competitors’ Traffic
Many webmasters spend part of their time monitoring their competitors’ performance. One of the things that they usually do is to try to learn more about competitors’ traffic. But when stats aren’t publicly available on a given site, how can one find out how many visits it gets?
On the Internet you’ll find several tools that can help you estimate a site’s traffic. Today I’m going to review one of them: Statbrain.
How this tool works
- It’s very simple: you type the desired URL in a box and some seconds later you’ll see a number in bold. This is meant to give you an idea of how many daily visits the analysed site gets.
- It must be emphasised that the tool deals with visits, which are different from hits, unique visitors and pageviews.
- The information provided by Statbrain is based on several external sources, such as Alexa and backlinks.
- It won’t work for subdomains. It’s meant for top domains only. I’ve verified it myself, putting some subdomains of mine to the test, and all I got as a result were distorted, inaccurate visit numbers.
Is it a reliable tool?
Well, I used it for the first time two months ago and at that time I found it much more flawed than it is nowadays. In fact, the visit estimates that StatBrain returned last time I tried their service — which was a few hours ago — were rather accurate, as opposed to the ones I got at that first occasion. And in both cases I put the same URLs to the test. All the sites and blogs that I analysed via Statbrain are owned by me, thus my confidence on the visit numbers’ accuracy (or lack thereof). So I can say that the people behind Statbrain seem to be working to improve it indeed.
Try it for yourself: type your own site’s URL and see what visit numbers you get. Then you can rate the results and even report possible inaccuracies to Statbrain’s staff; they make a form availabe for this. Click the “Send Feedback” button to access it.
Is it the best traffic estimation tool ever?
Certainly not. As I see it, the ideal tool should at the very least be able to analyse subdomains and/or inform uniques and pageviews. Statbrain can’t do neither. But it’s free and it works (to some extent), so I don’t see why you shouldn’t try it. Add it to your arsenal while you keep on using other traffic estimation and analysis tools. Just make sure that you will do something about the data that you compile, otherwise you’ll just waste your time with one more online toy.
