Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Tools for Measuring Popularity

The metrics of website traffic is a huge topic by itself, with a number of books just about web metrics, and quite a bit of software designed simply to help webmasters gather and understand the metrics of their sites. You’ll find more information about this subject in Chapter 13, but for now, to get started, it’s important to learn how to quickly get a feel for a site’s popularity.

Note

Website metrics is a very important topic because to optimize your site you need to have baseline information as well as feedback so that you can understand whether changes improve site traffic or not—and also which elements in your site draw traffic.

This topic is also important because the fees you can expect to get from advertisers largely depend on the metrics of your site.

Of course, your web server’s logs contain a great deal of traffic information that can provide you with useful metrics.

But, no doubt, the best metric of all is money in your pocket from goods and services sold on your site and from fees paid by advertisers—through the AdSense program or some other mechanism—for publication on your site.

Using the Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar can be installed in the Internet Explorer web browser. Go to http://toolbar.google.com/ to download the toolbar.

With the Google Toolbar in place, a button (shown at the very top in Figure 1-4) that can optionally be added to the Toolbar will give an indication of the PageRank, on a 0 to 10 scale, of a web page that is open in your browser. PageRank is a pretty good proxy for popularity, and as you might expect of an indicator created by Google, the Google home page is a perfect 10.

Figure 1-4. When you move your mouse over the PageRank button in the Google Toolbar, the relative popularity of the open web page is indicated on a scale from 0 to 10

The PageRank indication given by the Google Toolbar is not a precise tool. For one thing, the 0 to 10 scale is a different metric from the PageRank used in Google’s internal calculations. But as a quick and easy way to gauge PageRank, and therefore popularity, it is hard to beat this widget.

Let the Google Search Engine Be Your Guide

Since Google is the most popular of all search engines, why not use the search tools provided by Google itself to get a relative feel for the popularity of websites? I’d suggest a couple of ways to go about this. The point here is to regularly use the Google search engine on a variety of sites to get a feeling for how search rankings correspond to traffic.

The link: operator, when used in a Google search query, returns the pages that link to the specified URL (website address). For example, link:www.wikipedia.org returns all the pages that link to Wikipedia.org, as you can see in Figure 1-5.

Figure 1-5. Checking inbound links, like those shown here to Wikipedia, helps show the popularity of a site

While it should be noted that many inbound links will in fact be internal site links—also called cross links—quantifying the pages that link to a given site is an easy way to get a sense of Google’s assessment of a site’s popularity and, therefore, its traffic. (For more about the various kinds of linking, see Chapter 4.)

An alternative approach involves a bit of keyword analysis. You’ll need to understand what the most common keywords used to search for the site you are interested in are. This kind of keyword analysis, of course, is something you should do in any case if you are interested in promoting a site. As a simple example, if you were trying to find out how a site with a directory of dentists fared in search rankings, you could enter the word dentist in Google search and see where the site is returned in the results.

Armed with the search terms, you can run searches yourself. Over time, this will disclose whether a given site is moving up or down in the search rankings, and, as a snapshot, should give you an idea of whether a site is popular at all. A site should be in the top 30 search return results (the first three pages) to be considered a successful search result for a given term. In other words, you need to be on the first three pages to have a shot at getting decent traffic from a search engine.

Finding Popularity with Alexa

I’ve already mentioned Google as an example of a site with broad traffic. There are, of course, many others. If you are curious, you can go to Alexa, which monitors how much traffic a site gets and the relative increase (or decrease) in site popularity.

Note

Alexa is owned by Amazon.com.

On the Alexa site, click on the Top Sites tab to see an ordered list of the most highly trafficked sites, updated daily. The most trafficked sites (at the time of this writing) according to Alexa are shown in Figure 1-6.

Figure 1-6. You can find the current most popular websites using Alexa

Alexa’s Movers and Shakers, shown in Figure 1-7, is also interesting. This snapshot of the “right here and now” Web is useful for seeing if there are any web-wide trends in action—and also for learning about the kinds of exogenous events that move large-scale websites up and down the chutes and ladders of popularity.

Figure 1-7. Alexa’s Movers and Shakers can help with your education about what moves sites up and down the popularity ladder

While it is probably unrealistic to expect that you or I will be piloting sites that are at the top of Alexa’s list, it is worth spending time learning about popularity on the Web if you want to build successful sites. Alexa provides the tools you can use to see for yourself what is trafficked and what is gaining or losing among top-ranked sites.

You can also use Alexa to see traffic statistics for sites that are not in the top 500. For almost any site that has been around a while, Alexa will give you an idea of traffic statistics and whether it is gaining or losing traffic.

Note

Alexa lets you enter descriptive information about your website, which others can see if they check your site traffic using Alexa. You can also make sure that Alexa provides a snapshot of your home page along with its statistics. Since this service is free, it is certainly worth entering a site description.

Alexa works by collating results from users throughout the Web who have installed the special Alexa Toolbar. (If you’d like, you too can install the Alexa Toolbar and help with popularity statistics.) There’s some question about the statistical validity of Alexa for less trafficked sites because of this method of gathering data—that is, Alexa’s results are probably skewed toward users who are already web savvy and heavy users.

Note

Just as the Google Toolbar can provide you with information about the popularity of sites as you surf the Web, the Alexa Toolbar can give you helpful data about the relative popularity of sites. The Alexa Toolbar is particularly helpful in finding and comparing similar sites.

Most likely, Alexa’s results are not very meaningful for sites that are ranked below 100,000 in popularity (very roughly, with fewer than 10,000 visitors per week).

The Alexa ranking of 100,000 or lower is also a great divide: if your site is in the top 100,000, you have content that many advertisers will consider worthwhile. Being in the top Alexa results is a pretty good goal for your website or sites. You can make real money from a top 100,000 site; it is an ambitious goal, but attainable.

Note

Ranking.com provides a popularity ranking service comparable to Alexa’s.