other peoples stats

[jules]

From your experience what's the best, easiest and ideally free way to find out other peoples web stats (other than Alexa)

 

[eventdomain]

Companies will just declare certain stats, and not their full stats. Most stat packages I've used are very inaccurate and give only a very rough guide to possible traffic. Never gives the real figures..

Alexa can be manipulated by bots and teams of human clickers and aren't accurate.

Some sites eg: search engines, make some stats available for viewing, but these won't give the full picture of the real traffic hitting the site. I doubt you will be able to access anyones awstats results, as they'll get their own url extention made up, and it'll be security coded to stop access.

 

[tony84]

Companies generally dont advertise them. However heir advertising page may give you an idea. Otherwise if you are planning on advertising on their site you could just ask the question. But i think they would want to see proff of how interested you are before they disclose anything

 

[eventdomain]

i think they would want to see proof of how interested you are before they disclose anything

Ok, but how is a member of the public going to deliver this proof of intent. They can only give word of mouth, and unless they forward a payment, I don't see how they can show intent.

I doubt anyone will send a payment straight away without thoroughly checking out who their dealing with. Usually face to face meetings are the norm, and it might take 3 or 4 of those before the trust is established.

Even getting a client to attend several meetings is no guarantee of them doing business. So they aren't going to just send payment bcos they spoke on the phone, the trust cannot be there at a first contact stage.

I know of only 2 services that may, may get away with this, but these services are fairly easy to check the work standards anyway, and isn't the norm. For instance, I was approached by an accountant offering admin services, but there was no way I was going to sign up based on a single phone call, yet they expected it - and many others do. Quite crazy and frightening the lack of basic sales skills of some.

 

[tony84]

Maybe proof was the wrong word. But if i ws a company who offered advertising, and a customer wanted stats i didnt offer as standard then i would want to see they were serious about it.
I would expect to see information on their company, i would expect them to have information on target audience etc and in general come accross as a professional.

 

[eventdomain]

There's no secret messaging or sign that can tell you, a company is about to spend with you. The interested party will say whether they want to buy or not.

I can understand why some don't want to divulge traffic stats, but other things like demographics are usually available on websites, and so isnt a problem. Looking at how long a website/biz has been established is also important, as have seen a site with claims of 1 million hits a month, yet it had only been about for 12 months...

So yeah, some will just lie and hope this gets them the business. When I search for ad space, I do expect some bravado/bs about stats as it shows a hunger for the business, but too much bravado is a turn off.

A good rule is not to pay too much attention to stats, but use it as a rough guide to the website/biz. Personally I'd check to see if the site has a specific user type/following... Their a safer bet when buying ads.