Web Traffic Factor (for Exchanges)

Rationale

Our mission at CoinMarketCap has always been to provide all our users with the most accurate and relevant information to select exchanges and tokens to invest and trade in. We continuously strive to research, design and provide new and interesting metrics to make your lives easier in navigating the cryptocurrency space. Our Web Traffic Factor represents one of the initiatives that we are excited to share with you.

Exchanges used to be ranked by their reported volumes. However, volume inflation is a problem that plagues the cryptocurrency space. We went back to the drawing board and reviewed what important data we could collect for a more accurate representation of crypto exchange ranking. 

In the absence of wash-trading, volumes remain a good indicator of the health of an exchange. The “anatomy” of volumes can be broken down into two large drivers — traders and liquidity. In general terms, within a retail-driven crypto trading market, it is difficult to have high volumes without (i) a large number of retail traders and (ii) liquid markets. We have already comprehensively addressed the second driver with our proprietary Liquidity Score. We shall now address the first driver — number of traders.

While it would be counterproductive to ask exchanges for the number of traders on their site — those that have actively inflated volumes would simply inflate their user count — we found that a good substitute for user count would be web traffic. Thus, we designed a score showcasing exchanges' web traffic, making it easier for our users to compare exchanges.

Methodology

CoinMarketCap’s Web Traffic Factor takes into account various factors before arriving at a final output score. We track the numerous data points provided by various web traffic solutions (SimilarWeb, Alexa, Ahrefs) before arriving at a final score. Some of these data points include pageviews, unique visitor count, bounce rate, time-on-site, relative ranking and keyword searches on major search engines.

We will be tracking the exchange-submitted domain for the purpose of tracking Web Traffic.

Weighting of Data Points

After collecting the data collected from the various web traffic solutions of exchanges, we attribute weights to the data in the following manner:

• Pageviews (20%)
• Unique visitor count (15%)
• Bounce rate (10%)
• Time-on-site (5%)
• Relative ranking (25%) - we used Alexa’s relative ranking for all exchanges as data for this variable. An example of this data for Binance.com and Coinbase.com
• Keyword searches (25%) - we tracked the search engine ranking of exchanges for a select pool of keywords (for example, “cryptocurrency exchange,” “bitcoin exchange,” “cryptocurrency trading,” etc.)

After tallying the data, we distributed scores based on the relative performance of the exchanges in the above categories. The score is a relative point scaling system from 0 to 1,000. The top exchange will always be given 1,000 points, and the rest of the exchanges are given scores based on a relative comparison against that exchange. High scores would reflect high amounts of web traffic, which is a good indication of high user count. The score will be updated on a monthly basis.