Alexa.com has, what some webmasters would call, a "Traffic Rankings" function that allows you to view your rank in respect to the rest of the billions of websites on the WWW. But how useful is it? How is it used? What does it prove? I've attempted to answer some of these questions in this blog entry.
Alexa is a (pretty well) respected website, owned by the Amazon group. Over the last 10 years (it was founded in 1996) it has attempted to follow user trends and provide information to website owners (whom I refer to as webmasters, though I accept that this title is not necessary always accurate). Alexa collects its data from users who install its toolbar. This toolbar offers interesting information and tools, especially because of its links with Amazon; these allow you to view user reviews and ratings which is neat.
So, when a user with the toolbar installed visits any webpage, it communicates back to Alexa with that information. Alexa then compile these communications into reports and rankings for all websites that have been visited by users with the Alexa toolbar installed.
Make sense? Oh good. For more information, please
click here.
So the flaws are immediately obvious:
- Not everyone has the Alexa toolbar installed. Indeed, they are the minority.
- Those that do are disproportiante in different sectors (eg. webmasters may be more likely to have the toolbar installed)
- The toolbar is only available (natively) for Internet Explorer on PC
- Users behind personal or corporate firewalls or proxy servers may have problems with the backward communication to Alexa.
- Site owners who use the Alexa toolbar will inflate their own figures because of personal visits to their site, which could be more than 50% of all web traffic, depending on the size of the site! (eg. For one of my websites, 29% of all visits are by myself due to content updates and checking)
So, under these cirumstance, just how useful can the ranking pages actually be? Well, I have lead you somewhat on this issue and have rather presented the negatives, so my answer will seem a little obtuse. So, how useful?
Pretty useful!Sorry, I know that's confusing, so I'll explain. Even taking into account all the provisos above, we're still looking at a pretty reasonable snapshot of web users and still in volumes large enough that they have relevance. If you are at all interested in web statistics then you'll be more than aware that stats prove nothing alone, but that they do prove trends and averages. Alexa is a study in exactly these things, we are not looking at hard and fast facts here, we are looking at a picture that allows for comparison and examination of fluctuations.
You couldn't accurately or fairly say that Alexa's results "prove" anything - they are merely aids. I like to think that the Alexa toolbar aids me in calculating my position in the market compared to my competitors. It doesn't provide me with information that will help me change it, it merely tells me that there's room for growth. For some companies who are looking to advertise, Alexa's results and rankings give information about which sites are worth advertising on. For example, you could be looking at 2 websites whose visitors appear to be your target audience. They both have the same page rank, say PR5, rank well in search results for keywords you're interested in...but those two websites could have completely different levels of overall traffic. A really quick and easy way to check this would be to use the Alexa rankings.
Hopefully you've found this mini-foray into the Alexa world interesting, if not informative.
