Do you use Alexa? Or do you use their alter-ego competitor coming of age, Compete.com? Or do you use both?

Compete.com has this to say about their traffic vs. Alexa’s traffic:

According to them, they had more traffic than Alexa in September. However, its impossible to see what Alexa has to say about this, because if Alexa measured their own rank it would be #1, even though they clearly are not he most trafficked site on the net.

But lets see how closely Compete and Alexa match up:

The Big Three (Shoe, Chow, and Pro)

Any reader of this blog knows I love to talk about Shoemoney, John Chow, and Problogger. They work well with Alexa, because almost their entire audience has the Alexa toolbar installed to boost the rankings of their own ventures. So here’s what Alexa says about the rankings of the “top three”:

We can see they pretty much stay together, except that Problogger, illustrated in gold, pulls out way ahead everytime the blogosphere is in a state of Chaos and needs a credible source for real information. Also note that all three are currently in a nosedive at present. A full year low for all three of them.

Here’s what compete says about the same three sites:

So this shows us that Shoemoney has about 50,000 readers more than Chow, and Chow has about 50,000 readers more than Problogger. The problem with this analysis is that its (sorry compete) complete garbage. Their readership is pretty much the same, but I’m willing to give compete more time to proliferate the internet to get more accurate analytics.

The one annoying thing about Compete

is that their data is a month old. The right hand of the chart should end in November. Most people want up to date info. Let’s look at the same time period on the Alexa graph:

This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what Compete.com shows, with Shoe on top, and Problogger on the bottom.

Take home message

Compete may need some time to grow. I trust Alexa’s judgement better than Compete’s here, and Alexa says compete is wrong.