Quantcast, Compete and Their Cousins

I didn't think SpyFu was outdated? source?

Outdated is relative, I think. Maybe that was a harsh comment.

I know that it has lagged my campaigns by as much as 60 days. The site says last update 1/1, but is clearly not comprehensive.

I checked 3 companies -- 2 in East Coast major metros and 1 in multiple towns/cities in the West.

East Coast 1 -- Spend, clicks, budget all off by 2+ orders of magnitude.
East Coast 2 -- No record of $30-$40K annual spend on same major engine that's been in place with almost no changes since October 1.

West Coast -- Budget close, but CPC and traffic horribly wrong.

So what are your thoughts if you saw the same thing on traffic from Quantcast and Compete?  Would you advise a client or your boss to join the program?

probably due to where they are getting their data... ;-)

and it is all about sample size... just checking a small sample may be ok for offline polls. but on the web the isp matters immensely.

i'd look at comscore for data.

I have found that they are used as a guide by most media and businesses.  However, it really depends on the situation.

For example, when it comes to placing value on a site, I see that businesses generally require hard stats based on visitor logs to evaluate real traffic information.  I have never heard of a business being valued based solely on compete or any similar sites.

In terms of making a comparison, you generally have to accept that sites which gather these numbers CAN be compared to each other, but you have to be careful about comparing sites of different types.  I think that comparing two SEO Blogs using compete would be, most likely, as good as you could really ask for.  However, if you start looking at comparing sites of totally different themes and subject matter, the opportunities for differences in demographic, time spent on sites, and number of pages visited can really be skewed.

It annoys the heck out of me when agency types quote Alexa, Compete, Quantcast numbers as meaningful. In most cases it's just because they don't know any better. Since Quantcast offers the option to tag your pages, I've tried it on one site where ad sales are the primary revenue model. Because of the tagging it reconciles well to Google Analytics numbers, and gives us a public place where we can direct potential advertisers. Without the tagging I've found all three of the above to be way off compared to our GA and/or site logs.