Methodology
Details on our data collection, aggregation and quality control processes.
Source of Data
We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of analytics and social bookmarking products. We count sessions to our network sites, which are defined as a user active on a site with no more than a 30 minute inactive period.
A user can have multiple sessions per day. The data is compiled from approximately
100 million valid sessions per month, widely distributed over thousands of websites. The information published is an aggregation of the data from this network of hosted websites. In addition, we classify 430+ referral sources identified as search engines. Aggregate traffic referrals from these engines are summarized and reported monthly. The statistics for search engines include both organic and sponsored referrals.
This data provides valuable insight into significant trends for internet usage. These statistics include monthly information on key statistics such as browser trends (e.g. Internet Explorer vs. Chrome market share), search engine referral data (e.g. Yahoo vs. Bing vs. Google traffic market share) and operating system share (Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux market share or iOS market share vs. Android).
Additional estimates about the website population:
- 76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.
- 43% are commerce sites
- 18% are corporate sites
- 10% are content sites
- 29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc.)
