As I’ve already mentioned, Google Trends for Websites allows users to quickly and easily see traffic data from sites around the Internet. You just enter the address of a website (up to five at a time) into the search box and a graph will come up reflecting the number of daily unique visitors to a site over a period of time. Under the graph is a list of regions where the users came from, other websites they visited, and search terms they used. You will need to be logged in to your Google account to actually see the data.
According to Google, they get their information from “aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.” There is a minimum amount of traffic a site must have in order to be included in the tool, and sites that use a robots.txt file will not be included. In other words, if you’re not indexed by Google, you won’t be included. But the question remains: why wouldn’t Google just harvest the data from Google Analytics and be done with it?
For some reason, in March, Google stopped just short of allowing users to share their Analytics data with everyone. And with Trends for Websites, they’re only using “opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data.” I guess that means those sites that did opt-in will get better results than those that don’t. The only way to find out would be to test this service on your site and see how it compares to your own statistics, especially if you use Analytics.
It seems as though Trends for Websites will be yet another unverifiable source for traffic information, but the data it shows on other sites visited and other, similar searches should be fairly accurate considering the amount of information they collect through the search engine. And a smart web publisher can use this information to further optimize their sites. Click ahead to the next section to find out how.
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