Although it is impossible to tell precisely how many visitors a site is getting without having access to complete logs, and similarly difficult to tell how one site stacks up against another (especially when some site masters don’t know how to differentiate image hits from page hits, etc.), there are third party traffic tracking tools that provide one methodology of roughly benchmarking one site against another (although the accuracy may be questioned).

One such site is Alexa, and as noted by Jason Busch over on Spend Matters in November of 2007, Sourcing Innovation, the only other independent blog in the sourcing / procurement / supply & spend management space that publishes on a daily basis, was not only the 7^th most visited publisher of original content in the space, but the fastest growing content publisher in the space! With a three month change of 672,310 in the rankings, its growth rate was almost triple that of Spend Matters and essentially five times that of Supply Chain Digest, which was growing slowly while all of the other publications were essentially standing still. Not bad for an upstart blog that had been publishing for slightly less than a year and a half at the time!

The specific metrics on November 17, 2007 were:

Another such site, which I find to be much more reliable and consistent in rankings from month to month, is QuantCast. Since December 1, 2007, Sourcing Innovation‘s ranking has steadily increased from 5,530,305 to 434,201, making it, according to Quantcast, the fourth most trafficked publication in the space, preceded only by ISM’s Inside Supply Management, Purchasing Magazine, and Supply Chain Digest.

In addition, Sourcing Innovation is now peaking at an average of 15,000 unique page views a day! With the average visitor viewing an average of 1.5 pages per visit, it’s easy to see that peak days on Sourcing Innovation now attract over 10,000 unique visitors, with average days attracting in the range of 8,000-plus page views and 5,000-plus unique visitors.

However, the best measurement of this blog’s success is the bandwidth consumption rate, which is the most carefully tracked metric by any ISP. This blog is now serving up over 8 GigaBytes of pure text a month! (All images are hosted on separate sub-domains or web-sites with their own bandwidth allocations.) To put this in perspective, this is roughly equivalent to serving up the *entire* text of the Encyclopedia Britannica thirty times each month!