Here at FreshDV we love to stay connected with our readers, and site traffic patterns and statistics are oftentimes very revealing. By watching how visitors arrive at the site and what they tend to read, you quickly figure out what the hot topics are, and what the general audience appreciates most. The tools that gather and analyze traffic metrics are very helpful. They also have inherent flaws, and are sometimes just plain misleading. As a result, we’ve come to rely on a number of disparate tools and software to get a better overall “weighted” perspective of our site traffic. It’s somewhat nebulous to work in that fashion, but I believe that one simply cannot rely on a single metric or tool to get an honest snapshot of your site traffic. And it appears that one of those tools, Alexa, is slowly going the way of the buffalo. Techcrunch points out that they have seriously flawed data on Google vs Youtube traffic patterns, and that major oversight is an indication of just how irrelevant Alexa is in today’s online world.

To be fair, Alexa has always been regarded as somewhat imperfect by many site admins, as the tools they use to gather traffic patterns and “influence” ratings only represent a small slice of internet users. But many have also depended on that rating to sell ad space and make decisions. This might be a good time to consider checking other sources like Compete. Again, don’t just trust one source. The Compete toolbar only works on Windows XP/Vista, or Mac Firefox users. As a result Safari users don’t figure into the Toolbar metrics, so the only data gathered on their browsing habits would be through Compete’s ISP relationships. For what it’s worth, Compete isn’t even close to correct for our website until the past four months of graphs. But at least it’s a start. Thankfully there are a number of metrics we run locally on our site that present a much more accurate snapshot of traffic patterns and stats.