Sometimes you get curious to know traffic statistics of particular website. Then you might visit Alexa.com,  Compete.com,  Google Trends etc to know the traffic statistics and specifically rank of your site among all existing websites. Generally they display number of statistics like Number of unique visits, Rank of your site, Pageviews per User, Bounce Rate, and Time on Site etc.

Certain questions arise like,
1)    From where they come to know statistics about website?
2)    How reliable it is?
(I will not involve ‘Google Trends’ in my rest of discussion because personally I don’t prefer to question Google’s credibility as Google has largest number of users, advertisers across the world.)

Continue reading this article to kickass your curiosity.

Source of information can be,
·    To track user’s Internet activity using specific Toolbars (e.g. Alexa Toolbar for Alexa.com).
·    To get direct data from ISPs (Internet Service Providers)
·    And many more..

That means, they observe trends in selective users (say hardly 0.5 to 1% of total Internet Users of particular region) and apply results to that region. That means this results are never accurate and sometimes misleading.

For example, Compete.com claims that they observe online behavior of 2 millions of users in US (1% of total Internet users in US) and also claims it is largest user base they are observing for US. That means 1% of users are representing total Internet users in US for Compete.com. So, you have to figure out how reliable this information is.

I am not criticizing this but just making you aware of. Keep checking posts to see how reliable these statistics are.