Alexa was founded in April, 1996. It is probably most well known for both its toolbar and its “Traffic Rankings” site statistics tool.
Since its inception there have been concerns that Alexa data is flawed in some way. That is because the Traffic Rankings data comes from information harvested from toolbar users. Therefore the data could be easily manipulated.
There have been cases in the past where site owners have felt they could positively influence their own site ranking on Alexa merely by installing the toolbar and visiting their own website multiple times per day. While it would have been difficult to prove or disprove this claim, many felt that the data was flawed because of this perception.
True or not, there are so many more users of the toolbar that it is unlikely that it could be as easily influenced. Alexa claims “millions of toolbar users.” If this is the case then a single user (or handful of users) would be hard pressed to influence traffic data greatly without some form of automation.
That being said, is the Traffic Rankings data useful?
As with my previous article discussing Compete, the data is useful to an extent. That is, if you compare to your own visitor logs you will most likely find discrepancies. However to do a direct comparison between your site and a competitors site you will find the data useful.
What does Alexa offer?
Similar to Compete, Alexa offers some trended data to give you an idea of how a site has performed over a period of time. You can view data for a single site, or compare sites. For example, in the following screenshot you can see that we’ve compared 3 sites: Yahoo, Google and MSN.
As you can see, it appears that the MSN networks reach has been fairly steadily increasing while Google and Yahoo reach seems to be declining.
In terms of Traffic, Alexa shows that Yahoo is #1 while MSN and Google seem to jockey for the number 2 and 3 position. Currently, MSN is #2
The pageviews graph shows similar data as the network reach – that is that MSN is growing while the others are shrinking:
Yahoo is still #1 in overall page views but in December, MSN overtook Google in terms of pages viewed.
Alexa also displays text versions of this data for the first site only:
Here you can see Yahoo’s reach, traffic rank and pageviews yesterday, over the past week, and averaged over the past 3 months.
Aside from these types of traffic details you can also learn a variety of other useful information including where the sites visitors were from, how well the site ranks in other countries and which subdomains within the main domain get the most traffic.
In the case of Yahoo we can see that over 22% of the sites visitors are from the US, and almost 8% are from Taiwan. We can also see that Yahoo ranks #1 in these and other countries and ½ of Yahoo’s users go to the Yahoo.com domain for email while only 11% use it for search.
That’s great but I’m no Yahoo!
Even if you don’t have a large domain like Yahoo, Google or MSN Alexa can still be useful. For example, this domain – Marketingmule.com – is a fairly new site. While the domain has been around for a while this version of the site is new.
Using Alexa I can see what impact (if any) the change to this new format has had on the site. And according to Alexa, our average Pageviews have gone up a whopping 107% over the past 3 months!
Further, Alexa has a feature called “related links” where you can see what other sites your visitors go to. You can also see other sites which link to yours, and even view information about them. If you want to see what the site used to look like, there are links to the “Wayback Machine” where you can get views of the site over time.
In the end, I think Alexa can offer some useful information. While I wouldn’t wrap my entire online marketing campaign around the data I find on Alexa, I feel that when Alexa data is used in conjunction with other online services, and your own analytics, you can get a pretty good idea of the market you are competing in and what it might take to increase your market share.
