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Google Trends joins the ranks of Alexa in providing competitive analytics for measuring a website’s traffic. Google Trends for Websites. This is surprisingly accurate since all the data comes from and install base of general users in the millions. Alexa toolbar used to be a good standard in measuring website traffic until the install base of tech users overtook the general population user base. This led to large inaccuracies reported by the Alexa tool bar and ranks.

What’s Google Trends really up to by collecting all the user data from the Google toolbar? Can it become more powerful than Comscore? Certainly! With a user base that big, advertisers and media planners will pay a higher premium for accurate data representation of user demographics, and website traffic to run both display campaigns and where they should spend their top dollars on.

It is also useful in determining which of your competitors are fairing the best in terms of site traffic. Everyone would gladly pay top dollar for competitive information research. Compete.com has a business model based on a much smaller user base. There is nothing stopping Google from combining Google Analytics and Google Trends to offer it as a premium package for top dollars. Seems like Google is already exploiting the Trojan horse that was offered as free Google Analytics, and delivering all the private keywords data, and website traffic data back to the public at no charge or until they find a way to offer it up as a service similar to Comscore by charging firm a big premium.