I recently stumbled across Quantcast – a metrics tool. It provides more detailed information about visitor demographics than Alexa or Compete. It’s lacking otherwise in comparison tools – leaving it to the observer to draw their own conclusions. However, it’s a nice tool to add to an arsenal for reporting. The screenshot below is from Facebook, which ranks 16th overall on Quantcast but reaching 7th on Alexa.

As with most of these advanced analytics tools, smaller sites which make up the majority of the internet are lacking information, so all numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. They do however provide a good indicator of trends and should be used as such.

Compete, one of my favorite website metric tools, shows an interesting trend between three bloggers, two of whom I have met (Rodney Rumford and Nick O’Neill) and have a great deal of respect for. But neither the merits of these individuals or their websites, is the point of this discussion. What concerns me is the lack of quality metrics for this type of comparison. Google Analytics may have the best approach to solving this problem yet. With their new data sharing options, it will be possible for website owners to more accurately track their performance against other websites, including their perceived competitors (assuming they’re running Google Analytics too).

Alexa also offers online metrics and shows some similar trends but neither get the whole picture because the technology used to capture the data is browser based – ie, you install a plugin/toolbar and away you go. This doesn’t accurately capture many devices, including the quickly growing mobile device market, game consoles and non-plugable browsers (Safari anyone?).

Google’s AdSense tool has some drawbacks as well because JavaScript is device dependent – but over time that will become less of an issue as devices become more and more robust. Full integration of plugin enabled browsers on the phones seems much MUCH further away.

Michael Arrington pointed out on TechCrunch, that a share “With Everyone” option was needed. While we can certainly create accounts that have read access to our data and publish that information on our sites – it might be nice to get a 30,000 foot view of multiple sites without needing to authenticate to each and compare the numbers manually. I suggest a full Compete / Alexa type interface allowing users to explore not only a single site, but trends within a vertical, industry or even across industries is where the real data is.

Does the slow and steady decline of these three sites over the last few months indicate burn out on Facebook or is their user audience switching to MySpace centric blogs and news sources? I want to know and quite frankly, I don’t have a good way to find out.