Hello,

We are using web analysis software to measure various usage indicators
of our corporate website, such as the number of daily visitors, pages
viewed, visit length, etc.

We would like to find out how our company's web usage compares to
other corporate informational websites (excluding e-commerce).  I
understand this information is typically unavailable for individual
companies due to confidentiality concerns, but am wondering if there
are resources (university studies?) that provide aggregate information
for "corporate website viewership".  Our primary focus is mid-size "b
to b" companies within the high technology/semiconductor sector. 
(Although benchmarks for companies within other industries would also
be very helpful).

Thank you!

Hi there,

Our search returned the following results:

This article from ZDNet provides several links to sites that rank the
most popular sites in some way. This could be by category (in which
case you could just look at the sites for B2B):
http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/siteguides/popular.html

This next link allows you to compute your link if you have the number
of daily page visits for your own site as well as the most popular
site in your category:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/relativeranking.html

This service allows you to see where your site ranks for free if you
are in the top 200000 most visited sites. If you know some of the
sites that you are comparing your own to then you can simply enter the
domain name and find their ranking along with unique visitors, links,
visits, etc. A downloadable program will allow you to refine these
rankings for criteria such as category, location, age, etc:
http://trafficranking.com/

Alexa is another company that monitors traffic information and has
categories as well:
http://info.alexa.com/data/destination_site/traffic_rankings

You may find the results of this Google search to be of interest:
://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=website+traffic+study&meta=

In summary, there are services that will provide rankings and in some
cases actual data of website visitors and so forth. There are no
widespread studies (such as you had suggested) that explicitly provide
this data. Since there are so many sites out there that have multiple
functions, it becomes even more difficult seperate them into exclusive
categories.
According to the Internet Privacy Act the information you are looking
for cannot be made available unless the owners of the information
agree that it shouldbe made public (this would be the website owners).
Since the links above don't actually take the data from these site
they are not in any violation (instead they monitor Internet traffic
as a whole).

I hope this has answered your question..please post a clarification if
you need help with any of the information here :)

answerguru-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by connie-ga on 13 May 2002 13:38 PDT

Hi Answerguru,

Many thanks for the info!  Just one question regarding
http://www.trafficranking.com/mainframe.htm - do you know if their
stats are based on daily (or hourly?) visits?    Do they include the
"entire" Internet (or just those individuals using a particular
browser, host, and/or traffic service?)  And are they updated
frequently?

Best regards,

Connie

---

Clarification of Answer by answerguru-ga on 13 May 2002 18:46 PDT

Hi Connie,

The stats on trafficranking.com are for a rolling 24-hour period and
are updated every 10 minutes (as far as I know). They include visits
from any user on the "http" protocol..browser types are irrelevant.

Glad you found the answer useful...if you would like to express you
experiences about our exchange I encourage you to leave a rating (5
stars is the best).

answerguru-ga

Hello again Answerguru,

Many thanks for locating information which I tried (unsuccessfuly) to
find over the past six months.  I really appreciate your help!

Best regards,

Connie

Connie

Can you list a handful (5 to 10) of companies in which you would like
to be compared to?

One useful tool might be
  http://www.trafficranking.com/mainframe.htm
which ranks a very large number of sites on the basis of unique
visitors, visits, page views and links to. Optionally, you may type in
the name of a particular site and find a ranking based on popularity
or usage.

A similar service is offered by Alexa, at
  http://info.alexa.com/
but there are privacy concerns which make it the less attractive of
the two.