A better way to track website data?

If you have developed your domain names into websites in order to raise their value before flipping them on the website/domain market, or if you have looked at purchasing already created website you will agree with me that website stats cause a major headache in your decision making process.

Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Hitwise and various other public traffic indication tools each have a mind of its own when displaying website traffic stats. These services each have some quirk upon which their stats keeping is dependent. Alexa and Compete up until recently required the installation of their software for statistical compilation. Quantcast requires direct access to the websites in order to track stats, while Hitwise relies on ISP data. Overall, each has a flaw and does not represent accurate statistics of the mainstream population.

In exciting news Mozilla CEO John Lilly and VP Engineering Mike Schroepfer announced they may fix that problem in the future, via the massive installed base of Firefox users.

Firefox’s main aim is to be the main browser on the planet and as such will have direct access to mainstream surfing habits. As a sideproduct of being the main browser on the planet Firefox will be able to accurately track mainstream visitor data to almost any website in the world.

The new project still doesn’t have a name and is simply referred to as “Data” as it is in an early stage however it will base around users opting-in into an anonymous user data collection of user surfing habits.

Only a small percentage of the 170 million Firefox users would have to agree to be tracked (Lilly told TechCrunch that 1% is more than enough) to get useful data. There are Firefox users in every country, and the distribution is fairly attractive for worldwide analytics tracking. Only 29% of Firefox users are in the U.S. 13% are in Germany, 6% in France, 4% in the UK, and so on. Firefox is now available in 50 different languages.

This is definitely excellent news as it would mean we can finally have some accurate unbiased visitor stats for websites across the board.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.