Google Trends for Sites Vs Alexa
June 27th, 2008 by John CowFor the past few months we have been very skeptical of Alexa’s traffic trends data… and now thanks to Google and their updated Google Trends for Websites, there seems to be a bit of a justification for our skepticism.
In the below graph we compared JohnCow.com against three other blogs…
According to Google Trends results we see that we are pretty much neck and neck with entrepreneurs-journey, we are lower than JohnChow (not for long though.. bwahahahaha) and GarryConn is not even registering on the map… which is because it appears that Google has certain traffic criteria you have to meet before it will trend your site.
OK now lets compare this to what Alexa is saying…
According to Alexa the entrepreneurs-journey had a major traffic bump that Google does not show…. now this is something we are actually a little confused about because we know Yaro had some promo on his Blogging Mastermind Course (which is a fantastic course by the way) but that is on a different domain and not sure if such a spike would result on his blog. This also shows Garry Conn doing not too bad and JohnChow looks pretty close to the Google Trends data…. also, Alexa’s last little section is always whacked out.
Summary…
1. Google has more tool bars installed then Alexa (this is how the data is collected) and therefore it makes sense that their data would be more accurate (obviously we can not prove this)
2. Google’s data is up to date and Alexa’s always seems to be a week behind.
So what can you do with this info?
If you are into this kind of data, you could spend hours cross referencing your site against others… but is it worth your time?
We love Google trends for keywords because it is an excellent research tool for traffic potential and you could look at traffic potential of sites that you know are ranking well in certain markets… actually there are a few things we are going to play around and test.
So which is better?
Personally we would put our money on Google.
If you want to learn more about this you can check out what Matt Cutts (the Google Spam Czar) had to say about it, what the official Google Webmaster Blog had to say about it, what Search Engine Land had to say about it and well even Shoemoney did a little mention on it 
So, what are your thoughts on Google trends… do you see potential for good use or do you feel it is just another confusing element to an already confusing system?
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