Alexa Traffic Rank Heats Up
by: Benjamin Pfeiffer - April 08, 2003
Alexa as defined on their website is a "Web Information Company". This
company is a rising contender in the ever popular toolbar competition
to get you to use a browser toolbar. Alexa is the web information
company that powers the Alexa traffic rating system that we will
explain in detail here. It also boosts some useful tools you probably
didn't even know about. I believe part of using a browser toolbar is
getting the most use out of it possible. Period. Getting information
out of a browser toolbar may not be as simple as it may seem though.
Bars, graphs, numbers, more numbers, links, and search boxes. Whats up
with just telling it to me straight?! Fortunately if you are reading
this article you will have a better understanding of Alexa by the time
you finish. Ok lets get started.
Alexa seems hard for people to understand at
first. For
example: I caught a guy on eBay trying to sell a website that claimed
to get 2,000,000 hits a month. He read the Alexa rating wrong. Or a
company claiming to be in top 10,000 websites on the web compared to
its competitors by showing you its low Alexa rank. This company didn't
realize some of its competitors had the same rank as well. You'll
understand in a minute. One way to use Alexa ratings is to access
traffic levels. You cannot determine how much traffic a site is getting
just by looking at it. Its a website, and many like to hide how many
visitors they may get for whatever reason. So wouldn't it be handy if a
company came up with a way to show you how much traffic a website gets?
Well, Alexa did it and now you can see the traffic a website is getting
using Alexa.
First off, people need to understand that Alexa's
numercial ranking
system is DEPENDENT on the number of Alexa toolbars users that visit
your website. This should be an underlying understanding each time you
view a website to gauge its traffic levels. If you ignore this, then
your impression of a website can be incorrect. This is a very common
mistake that people make, and ultimately find out the error in their
judgement. Get the facts before you make a decision based on Alexa. Let
Alexa guide you to the correct information, and consider its rankings
an estimation of traffic levels a website may recieve in any given time
period.
Alexa is really easy to understand once you get
the hang of it.
Understanding how to read the rankings will be worth your time. For the
duration of this article, consider your website or one you are familiar
with. This will help apply what you learned here to something you can
actually see and control. Every website whether or not its wants an
Alexa rating, will get one. So forget about writing the Alexa company
requesting to be removed. The Alexa rating can only help you.
How Alexa ranks your website:
Ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000
and it goes beyond 4
mil sometimes. The LOWER your rating on Alexa the better. Meaning if
you have a ranking under 100,000 then your website should be producing
some good traffic. 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 ratings are for new sites
mostly, or sites with no traffic basically. While a rating of 1 will be
the website with the most traffic. Use your Alexa toolbar to check on
Yahoo's website for verification. Keep this in mind as well, you have
to give it 3 months to give you an accurate rating.
For example, if you have a rating of say 300,000,
which is not too
shabby, you are getting about 14x the amount of traffic a 4,000,000
site gets. But this could not be accurate because you have not given
Alexa enough time to rank your website properly. A system can be
developed to tell me what a sites traffic level is from its rating,
this should allow you to surf the web and get a good estimation of how
many visitors a website gets a day. Do a little research comparing
Alexa ratings with actual website traffic statistics to gauge a system
for yourself.
The flaw in Alexa is that it determines traffic
blindly. This means
that you can elevate your level by increasing traffic to your sites.
Meaning that if you claim your site is getting 10,000 hits a day and if
you are great, but that doesn't determine what it will get after you
stop advertising. It’s an over time thing. The rating will eventually
go back up [which is lower traffic levels again] once the traffic
tapers off but its takes several weeks.
Best thing to do is look at your site traffic
stats and then look at
your Alexa rating. Then watch the rating a couple of times a week to
see if any changes have occurred. I lost 600,000 in rating points in
one week from new search engine traffic. So the longer your site has
been monitored by Alexa the better, it gives more of an accurate level
of reporting. I also use Alexa to watch my rating over a month period.
What my advertising has done for my site, etc... I am sure you can
think of the possibilities.
Alexa also monitors the Average Pages Viewed by
one visitor over a day,
week, or month. The more pages viewed the more interested you visitors
might be about the information on your site. If you get 1.0 as your
Average Pages Viewed score, then one person only looks at one page on
average at different time periods. Get a score of 7, most of the time
it means 7 pages viewed per visitor.
Alexa also accesses reach per million of users.
This rating is tricky
to understand as well, took me a bit to put it all into explainable
numbers not just rating points. Yahoo has a reach per million internet
users of 28% which means for every 1,000,000 million visitors, they get
280,000 of that traffic. So if you have a traffic level of 20 then that
means for every million people 20 visit your site.
Now, onto how to REALLY use the power of
the Alexa ranking system:
The power in the Alexa ranking is your ability to
tell if someone is
telling the truth about their traffic levels, whether its good to
purchase advertising space on a website and you want to see if they are
really getting the unique hits they say they are. Check domains you
could buy with traffic, show you where traffic is going on the web,
show you which of your websites is more popular. How about determining
what method your competitors are using to advertise their websites?
Hmmm...is it search engine traffic or is it email marketing campaigns?
Is it short-term targeted hit traffic or is it pop-unders over a longer
period of time?
Here is how. Next time you come upon a website,
and you want to
know more. Click on the "Info" button to the left of the Alexa rating.
What this will do is take you to the page telling you information about
the website you are at. It shows you the traffic rank, snapshot of the
website, various links, and possibly a review by an editor. Look over
to the LEFT of the screen. Click the "Traffic Detail" link. This will
take you the page with detailed traffic information. Most of the stuff
explained above will be on this page. Ok here is what you are looking
for in the first graph with about 3-6 months of traffic detail. Do you
see any sudden fluctuations in traffic? Any large mountains on those
horizons? Ignore changes that are 10,000 to 30,000 in difference. This
is too much of a gray area to determine much. What you are looking for
is LARGE fluctuations in traffic, dips and increases. A massive change
from say 100,000 to 1,300 means this website has increased its traffic
by almost 90,000 points!! Now what would do that? Email marketing
campaigns, direct hits, pay-per-click campaigns, short term banners on
high traffic sites, etc... Imagine all those new unique hits visiting a
website using the Alexa toolbar. Its going to raise the Alexa rating by
a lot. But what type of marketing would mean long lasting hills and
smaller spikes in the graph. Most likely constant marketing strategies
such as organic search engine traffic, repeat visitors, forums, longer
PPC campaigns, and the possibilities go on.
I encourage everyone that is reading this article
to put Alexa to work
for you. Information for the right reasons is no longer as free as it
once was. Using a free tool like Alexa will help you not only have some
understanding about your website and others but understand the impact
of your overall marketing strategy in the long run. So use it, read it,
but don't misunderstand it.
Check out Alexa at http://www.alexa.com
|
