Firefox ‘Data’ Could Help Justify Blogger Relations

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By Matt Clark

As reported by TechCrunch, Firefox is working on a project called “Data” that will help track internet surfing habits and capture web analytics. This is great news for the PR professional. Often we are asked to justify blogger relations. I can’t tell you how often I hear “Yeah… but how important is this guy?” when asking my clients to speak with bloggers. Older executives still don’t see the importance of bloggers without numbers-backed credibility.

I can’t blame them as many bloggers just spew random thoughts at the screen and have no measurable authority (like pay for play bloggers). But those in social media know how important bloggers are, and need the numbers to show potential ROI to our clients.

Firefox will ask their 170 million users to opt into the reporting system (similar to Alexa) to have their surfing habits collected anonymously. The great thing is that only a small percentage of those users would have to agree to be tracked to get statistically relevant results.

Until the new product launches, PR pros need a way to gather similar data. We wrote a few tips on this a while back in post called How to Find Top Influencers and Blogs. But what else is out there? Here are a few:

Alexa & Compete
Both of these sites rely on users to install software on their computers which tracks web visits and estimates Internet-wide traffic. Alexa, used by many VCs, has many flaws (like what?), while Compete only tracks US users.

Comscore
Similar to Alexa and Compete, Comscore relies on user-focused metrics to create proprietary databases along with user surveys and direct tracking from major web sites. The problem is that it is very expensive to access their database.

Quantcast
Site owners need to embed a small javascript tag which lets Quantcast get direct traffic and predict accurate traffic analysis. Quantcast, however, didn’t have “enough data to profile” most of the sites I tried measuring.

Hitwise
Hitwise mainly uses ISP record to provide clients with web analytics, however they also claim to use installed software (like Alexa) and site traffic (like Quantcast) to measure internet usage.

Google Analytics
Yeah right, like Google would make anything public…