Scorecarding your Way to Success

You have invested a considerable amount of time and effort in building your web presence and promoting your products and services on the Internet. It is now time to find out how well you are doing…

Since the dawn of the Internet, many paid, low cost and free services have sprung into action with the exclusive purpose of performing an analysis of your digital property from a variety of perspectives. Where as some scorecarding services assess your website in terms of visitor activity- Google Analytics is the leader in this category - other services evaluate websites on additional parameters such as traffic rank, audience profile and even their worth in the open Internet resale market. While not all these performance analyzers are entirely reliable in terms of the data they provide, they are an excellent way to bench mark your website’s status in the online space in terms of universal competition and overall general performance.

A Dose of Skepticism
Trying to measure the impact of these services on your site’s reputation is not as easy as trying to measure the impact of live chat on your bottom line. This is because except for one of the services - Alexa - none of these scorecarding services have really gone mainstream. Here are a few web scorecarding services, which you should consider signing up for, at least in the free services category, and examine the reports they generate about your website. Remember, however, that the results they generate are more or less points of view and you should not base any decisions exclusively on what these services reveal to you.

Quantcast
Our first act in the saga is Quantcast http://www.quantcast.com. This is an audience profiling service, which essentially means that it can shed detailed information on the type of audience your website addresses. Quantcast observes anonymous records of visits to Internet destinations without collecting any personally identifiable information about site visitors. The company deploys powerful statistical state-of-the-art technologies to understand digital media audiences. The data this service generates about your website will help you understand the precise composition of your audiences and thus attract higher advertising revenues from your sponsors and advertisers. The service can even help you identify audience groups and online discourse communities you may not know of otherwise. This web site allows you to view audience reports on millions of digital media properties, which means you can monitor your competition in real time.

Keyword Spy
Keyword Spy located at http://www.keywordspy.com, provides, in its free version, valuable statistics about those websites that constitute its database of over thirty million domains. The company describes itself as a competitive intelligence provider with access to much of your PPC campaign data if you happen to be using PPC from one of the search engines. The service can be perceived as a combination of Spyfu www.spyfu.com and Compete www.compete.com, two well-established websites with which you should register and set up accounts. Both Spyfu and Compete provide a wealth of information on your competition right down to their PPC budget allocations. It is generally believed that the data provided by both Spyfu and Compete is quite reliable and current.

McAfee Site Advisor
McAfee Site Advisor is an indispensable browser plug-in you should download and install so that you can check your own website daily for the presence of viruses, trojans and malware. This free plug-in can help you detect problems well before Google thus ensuring that Google’s virus message is not appended to your URL when it appears in search results. The browser plug-in is located at http://www.siteadvisor.com and is frequently updated by the company. In the unfortunate event that your website is infected and Google finds out about it before you do, your website will remain in limbo and will continue to plummet in the search engine rankings until Google chooses to visit your website again in order to index it. This is known to have taken up to three months at times

Final Diagnosis
Protecting your online investment as an e-entrepreneur is as important as operating and expanding your service spectrum. Visit the companies we have mentioned and recommended above and you will notice that there is plenty of help available for the asking to help you safeguard your Internet property from distress.