Until a few months ago I’d never heard of Alexa. Since starting my blog I’ve learned from other bloggers and Alexa rankings kept coming up in conversation. I checked out the Alexa website, found their site widget, and installed it. I recently discovered their toolbar and installed that too.
I’ve become more and more intrigued with Alexa as I’ve watched my ranking drop from more than 12,000,000 to 460,416 in exactly 60 days after moving my site from wordpress.com to self-hosted. In the last week alone it’s dropped by more than 400,000.
(When it comes to the Alexa ranking, the lower the better. For example, Google is #1. You can see a list of Alexa’s Top 100 sites here.)
Cartoon by Hugh
I decided to learn a bit more about it and found “How to Improve Your Alexa Ranking” on The Daily Anchor:
“Alexa – an Amazon.com company – ranks websites based on the level of traffic they receive from visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed; the lower a website’s Alexa ranking, the greater their traffic. Alexa rankings are most useful to webmasters and advertisers who use Alexa rankings to determine the worth of a link from (or banner ad on) a given website (e.g. The Wall Street Journal can claim to be ranked #386 out of 300,000,000 websites, which is a pretty huge value statement.) While webmasters have access to web analytics tools that show them incredibly detailed visitor information on their website, there is no way for you or me to gauge the traffic to their website without using a service like Alexa.”
Upon installation of the Alexa toolbar it collects data on browsing behavior and transmits it to the Alexa website where it is stored and analyzed for the company’s web traffic reporting service.
There seems to be quite a bit of controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. Assuming that Alexa’s user base is a fair sample of the Internet user population Alexa’s ranking should be accurate. However, not much is known about possible sampling biases. A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on the rankings does not appear to be reported.
Alexa traffic rank was originally based on three months of aggregated data and was a combined measure of page views and users. On April 16, 2008, many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed later that day that they had released the new Alexa ranking system, claiming that they now take into account more data sources beyond Alexa Toolbar users.
On March 31, 2009 Alexa.com got a complete redesign and new metrics including: pageviews per user, bounce rate, and time on site. They later added new features including demographics, clickstream and search traffic stats.
Why should you care?
If you’ve got a website you’d like to monetize then you might want to pay attention. Your Alexa rank will increase your bargaining power when it comes real estate on your site (i.e. ad pricing). Even though Alexa rankings are not a thoroughly accurate depiction of traffic, prospective advertisers will look at your ranking in order to assign a dollar value to your site.
For example, the difference between an Alexa ranking of 1,000,000 and 50,000 can translate to thousands of dollars for an ad on your site.
{ 2 trackbacks }
Comments on this entry are closed.