Why doesn’t Compete’s estimate of site visitors match my local analytics (e.g. Google Analytics, Omniture)?
Compete”s site profiles estimate how many people visit your site from a diverse sample of people that is statistically normalized and projected to represent the size and demographic composition of the total active U.S. Internet population. Compete does not rely on cookies which are often used by log files and web metrics firms. Because of cookie deletion, return visits by the same person (with deleted cookies) wrongly appear to be a new unique visitor. In addition, if cookie implementation on the server side is done incorrectly with vague or inconsistent definitions, visitors will be overcounted. Compete measures only US activity. Traffic at sites with significant international visitors will be understated by Compete’s projections. In addition, local analytic solutions will often include the activity of spiders and bots that appear as traffic, but do not represent actual human activity. Compete”s services do not rely on log files or cookies and therefore do not count this activity as t
