We all know that these days it is hard to say whether a website is a success or not. Simply it can say and claim anything on its home page. So is there a way , ( analytics , company data , registers etc ) that you can quickly obtain info for a website which info will will give you a picture of how successful that web site is .. ?

www.alexa.com can give you stats on just any website.

Another couple of options are complete.com and quantcast.com.  One of the difficulties is that for smaller sites these free tracking sites do not provide accurate results.  If you have money to spend Hitwise is the best and most accurate choice.

All the advice above is helpful.  I`m wondering why you need to know, if a site is successful. 

my two cents...
First of all its not really about the site... Again... it`s true what you said "They can claim anything on their web page because of course they control the content" But again, just because they get the hits, is the company making any profit? I would be more concerned about their Cash Flow, and Conversion rate. Meaning how many of those customer`s are actually buying.

I know lots of small sites that do not have mass traffic, thus they are converting almost every other person that lands on their web site. So if 1200 people visit per week, 600 of those are customers. My jaw dropped....



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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

Quantcase and Alexa doesn`t give stats if the site`s traffic is too small. 

Try compete.com, I get better results here.  (even if the site is not in the top 100,000)

My take on this... don`t put too much weight on site visitor counts.  Some of them may be just drive-by clicking.

As Nuevolution said, look at conversion rates.

Also, in my personal experience, pageviews per visitors are a more important metric for my site rather than total visitors count.  I could correlate my pageviews per visitor numbers with the amount of sales I made for a particular month.    High pageviews per visitor means they are totally interested in my content/offering/product.  They will either purchase that same month, or the following few months (as I found out from conversations with them.)