Question:
Can anyone check the traffic of any website?
Answer:
No you cannot check the traffic using google analytics of any website without being the admin for that website.
There are sites which will give you general Idea of the traffic of a particular website, but this info is not completely accurate.
Below is the list of such website which will give you general info on the website and its demographics:
1. Alexa – Alexa won’t tell you the actual page views of a site but an estimate of the percentage of Internet users that may have visited your site during a given period. Now assuming that the number of Internet users did not changed drastically in the past 6 months or so, a site’s reach as determined by Alexa can be proportional to the unique visitors.
2. Trends for Websites – Google Trends uses data from Google search, Google Analytics and other third-party market research services. Since Google search is the largest source of traffic to most websites (especially those in the tech domain), Trends for Website can give a fairly accurate estimate of site traffic.
3. StatBrain – This is the only service that claims to provide a count of daily visitors to any website. StatBrain does so using data from a number of external sources like Alexa Rank, backlinks in Google, location of web server, etc.
4. Compete – You can use Compete to estimate the total US traffic for nearly every site on the web. Compete uses data from ISPs, their own toolbar and other data source to calculate the unique visitors and hits (or pageviews) of a site.
5. QuantCast – Like Compete, QuantCast too gives an estimate of hits and unique visitors along with visitor demographics.
6. Google Ad Planner – This is my favorite tool that is both accurate and comprehensive. You get to know the traffic of any website in a particular geographic region (or worldwide), average number of visits per visitor, total page views, unique visitors and the broad category of that site.
Here’s how you can use Google Ad Planner to determine the traffic of any website:
1. Click the “Begin Research” tab in your Ad Planner dashboard.
2. Type the URLs of all websites that you want to research in the “Sites Visited” section of “Online Activity”
3. You’ll see that all those sites now appear on the right side. Click the name of the site to view the traffic and demographic details of that site.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Too many website owners do not know how to correctly analyse their statistics so that they can produce better results as well as ensuring the website content is targeted towards the visitors interests.
Great article.
Either you should be the owner/webmaster or you should have access to the website. If you are working for some client and you dont have any access directly, than you can ask conserning person to perform required actions in order to verify website ownership in Google Analytics panel.
Google Analytics provides a script to be included in every page of the website, for which you need to track traffic. The varification is required, so that, any XYZ person could not get traffic details of your website, which is very very very inportant for any business which is depending on its website.