Comments on: Yelp.com & Unique Vistors: Would the Real Number Please Stand Up

By: AhmedF

AhmedF — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:07:45 +0000

Google estimates 28 million estimated cookies, 10 million users.

Yelp uses Google Analytics, which would be far more accurate than any of these estimation sites. Plus they are likely getting a ton of mobile usage that these trackers cannot figure out.

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 01:17:57 +0000

It seems most companies can skew these results so they favor what they are trying to show. There are so many strange outcomes based on what you’re using to measure. Not sure where they are getting their numbers.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 01:14:19 +0000

@Dan Your assessment makes sense but like David, I didn' realize Trends showed hard numbers. One thing that is interesting is that complete, before their methodology change in June were in fact were showing Yelp in the 25-30 million range. When I asked them about it, they said they were no longer counting traffic from Widgets and other embedded sources of traffic. Not sure how that would cause such a drop but it at least put their numbers in the range of Yelp, comscore & google.

By: David Kyle

David Kyle — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:05:17 +0000

@Dan

How do you get Google Trends to display a hard number? I thought it was only used for determining scale. According to Google Trends the traffic from the other countries appears to be insignificant.

By: bobby Carswell

bobby Carswell — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 21:40:42 +0000

“the many ways that unique visitors can be counted”
this seems to always be a problem.
bobby

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 20:41:36 +0000

These numbers will just be for US visitors (not sure about Comscore, but definitely Qunacast), and Yelp were probably referring to all their sites (US, Canada, UK, France, Ireland, Germany). Furthermore a lot of people browse Yelp whilst at work, which messes with the way these services collect data. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing 30 – 40 million uniques. About 25m US and 10m ish the rest. Google trends (which I find is a better source if you aren’t bothered about the lag) would put yelp.com at around 25m.

By: David Kyle

David Kyle — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 17:22:33 +0000

Interesting. When comparing data I have access to, I’ve always found ComScore to be inflated. Quantcast and Compete have generally had more accurate data.