Comments on: Thoughts on Alexa data

By: Tuke

Tuke — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:48:16 +0000

When it comes to alexa you have to be careful not to just take the numbers as is just like with any other statistic.

First anything that has a rank number of 100K or higher (as in 200K not 10K) is about as accurate as blind person taking a shot after being spun around a few times.

Now as for the ones between 1 and -100K? you have to compare LIKE sites to get any meaning thus comparing ask.com with mattcutts.com on alexa is about as useful as comparing a freeway to a country. This is for the obvious reasons of skewness which many users here have pointed out already. Finally if the numbers on the sites you are comparing feel wrong then maybe it is because one of them is using techniques to ramp up their ranking, thus any ranking on site you suspect is doing that is meaningless and you should ignore it.

As for the government (.gov) sites having a declining reach, think of it this way. All the time more users are coming online in the world. Most of those new users today are not in US as the penetration of internet in US is relatively high compared to the rest of the world. The users who use the internet from those other countries are not generally speaking as interested in any information on us government sites as US citizens, thus the more of the world comes online the less the reach of the .gov sites should be.

I am a technical person and I do give alexa ranking some value as it gives me an easy way to see how my competition is doing compared to me, but I always apply the principals above before just going “oh my gowd this site is…” fill whatever you want.

By: Squeaky

Squeaky — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:23:25 +0000

I really do not believe in Alexa stats but there are many who do. From my experience, it still seems that many consider it when purchasing a product or service from a website.
I have a large amount of my visitors which use Vista and there isn’t a Alexa toolbar doesn’t support Vista. So, my Alexa stats are not accurate at all and does have an impact on directory submissions for Madmouse.

As long as people believe in the tooth fairy, people will still believe in Alexa..

By: Werner

Werner — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:54:21 +0000

How important is Alexa?
In Germany, Alexa is not so well known,
How important do you think the Alexa rank really?
Greetings from Germany
Werner

By: David

David — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:53:06 +0000

I help manage a government website http://www.govbenefits.gov – we’ve seen our site traffic decline over the past two years which is consistent with the “Reach” data I see on Alexa, I’m wondering from the group if there is any sense if the “reach” data is at all accurate. Since we don’t advertise ranking is not so important. My fundamental research question is, over the past five years has there been a decline in site traffic to .gov domains? I’m having trouble find a reliable source of data to answer that question. When I put in four or five other large .gov domains like epa.gov, hhs.gov, and ssa.gov it would appear that there has been a decline in reach. Any help is greatly appreciated.

By: Notebook

Notebook — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:25:27 +0000

I don’t think that anybody really trusts Alexa stats. We use google analytics, and other 7 stats just to give us an indication of what is going on, not to rely on statistics.
Anyway the sales are important, not stats.

By: WebTenet

WebTenet — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:38:22 +0000

Everyone knows Alexa data is far away from accuracy since they depend fully on the sample space of internet users who have the alexa toolbar installed or any firefox plugin like SearchStatus. My alexa rank shot up from 1,373,556 to an awesome 261,641 in just a month and half after installing SearchStatus plugin on my firefox.

However inaccurate, many people are using their alexa rank for pricing advertisements… at least I know someone who was utterly disturbed because AdBrite wanted to remove advertisements from his site because his alexa rank dropped. Not sure if this should be believed.

I have put both SiteMeter and Google Analytics on my website. The stats given by Analytics and SiteMeter are grossly different… looks like a jungle of stats, counters, analytics… and so on. Is there anything that is truely reliable?

By: Squeaky

Squeaky — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 04:08:09 +0000

It is sad that large amount of people, base Alexa traffic stats for their business marketing. Alexa doesn’t even support Vista users and with the big push that computer manufacturers are making for Vista for Business, that really hurts a lot of us.

Alexa, I rather believe in the tooth fairy.

By: MNS

MNS — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:34:33 +0000

Isn’t a page handicap, if it isn´t visit more from dbrowsers with Alexa toolbar?

By: Tvorba web stranok

Tvorba web stranok — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:09:19 +0000

Better is to use more than one statistics, then just only Alexa, but even thought its hard to get accurate data.

By: Murk

Murk — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:30:07 +0000

I recently saw one of my legacy sites (from 1996) drop in the Alexa rankings. Last few years it was around 18,000, then plummeted this past year down into the 300,000+ range. The site averages well over 350,000 *uniques* per month, mostly from Google search of our evergreen content. As mentioned throughout the above comments, advertisers and investors both ask about Alexa rankings as if they are somehow “official”. I never paid attention until this past year, when our rankings dropped and advertisers squawked. I finally installed the Firefox Alexa extension on my browser and watched my Alexa ranking climb up to 150,000 or so within a week. I asked my partner to install it and now we’re in the 90,000 range.

Geesh! I guess I’ll ask my family to start using the damn thing…