Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

For those of you who measure the traffic of a particular job board (or blog) with Hitwise stats, you may want to take another look at how that data is cultivated and whether Hitwise (or any other analytics site) is the most accurate gauge.

A post by Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch last week showed just how erroneous Hitwise data can be when compared to Google Trends, which Arrington said is much better at analysis since Google commands such a large lead in search in most countries, so presumably the data is far more accurate than Quantcast, Hitwise, Alexa, etc., who are all flawed in various ways to various degrees.

So which analytics firm is the best?

With regards to searching keywords, I agree that Google Trends is the most accurate reflection. Trends has the ability and reach to hone in to virtually any market in the U.S. or abroad, and since the majority of people rely on Google for search, than you can be sure you are getting a truly authentic snapshot. Here is their analysis in the last 12 months regarding traffic to Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, and Hotjobs (a search for hotjobs.yahoo.com only picked up Yahoo’s traffic, not the job board subdomain).

And here is Compete’s take.

There are clearly some major discrepancies here in the case of each job board. The same comparison problem occurred when I created snapshots at Alexa and when I accessed recent job search analysis from comScore and Hitwise.

So should we dismiss this data as misleading if none seem to agree?

It depends on which site you trust and prefer. Each firm has their own methodology for retrieving and measuring traffic data. Before exporting a metrics chart into your latest press release, be sure to undergo a complete analysis of the methodology to ensure the most accurate reports.

Update: Jennifer Grasz from CareerBuilder added this to take into account:

At the end of the day, employers are concerned about reaching the widest audience of relevant traffic for their job postings. CareerBuilder’s business model is different than that of destination communities. We have over 1,700 partners that serve as traffic sources for our employers’ jobs including MSN, AOL, newspapers, etc. All of these don’t have a CareerBuilder URL, so when using some tracking sites like Compete or Alexa, you are erroneously not attributing the proper exposure that employers receive. Hope this is helpful.

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