Website traffic measurement and rankings: competitive intelligence tools examination

作     者：Prantl, David Prantl, Martin 

作者机构：Univ W Bohemia Plzen Czech Republic 

出 版 物：《INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WEB INFORMATION SYSTEMS》 (国际网络信息系统杂志)

年 卷 期：2018年第14卷第4期

页      面：423-437页

核心收录：

学科分类：08[工学] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

主　　题：Advanced web applications Rankings Webometrics Internet quality of service Internet traffic engineering Competitive intelligence tools Website traffic 

摘      要：Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine and verify the competitive intelligence tools Alexa and SimilarWeb, which are broadly used for website traffic data estimation. Tested tools belong to the state of the art in this area. Design/methodology/approach The authors use quantitative approach. Research was conducted on a sample of Czech websites for which there are accurate traffic data values, against which the other data sets (less accurate) provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb will be compared. Findings The results show that neither tool can accurately determine the ranking of websites on the internet. However, it is possible to approximately determine the significance of a particular website. These results are useful for another research studies which use data from Alexa or SimilarWeb. Moreover, the results show that it is still not possible to accurately estimate website traffic of any website in the world. Research limitations/implications The limitation of the research lies in the fact that it was conducted solely in the Czech market. Originality/value Significant amount of research studies use data sets provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb. However, none of these research studies focus on the quality of the website traffic data acquired by Alexa or SimilarWeb, nor do any of them refer to other studies that would deal with this issue. Furthermore, authors describe approaches to measuring website traffic and based on the analysis, the possible usability of these methods is discussed.