Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

There are several services out there that seek to rank websites based on the number of viewers (traffic) each website receives. Alexa is an Amazon.com service that uses a panel of users who have installed a special browser plug-in to estimate website traffic. The browser plug-in is free and is available to anyone who wishes to use it.

It’s difficult to say how many folks have installed the Alexa browser plug-in but I’m estimating it’s between very few and not many. As such Alexa has a hard time providing useful estimates for low traffic websites since it’s pretty unlikely someone in the tiny Alexa pool will visit a site with very little traffic. When an Alexa user does visit a site, that site’s ranking can quickly jump from 10 million to 500,000 in a short period of time. So don’t stress if your site ranking goes up and down like a roller coaster - it’s normal.

So what is Alexa good for? For starters, it is a pretty good tool for understanding relative traffic patterns among websites. Plug in your site and your competitors’ sites and you can see how your traffic and rankings compare. You can also see which sites link to your site and your competitors’ sites and also get a list of related sites if you’re not sure who your competitors are.

Unlike some website ranking services, Alexa doesn’t give you an estimate of pageviews or visitors. Instead, Alexa displays a cryptic ‘reach percentage’ which is a measure of the percentage of global internet traffic a website receives. So, for example, cnn.com has a global daily reach of around 1.5% meaning 1.5% of global internet users view the site each day. But this begs the question: how many global internet users are there? Alexa isn’t telling us so the measure is largely useless unless we’re comparing relative numbers between sites.

If you already have a website, check out your Alexa ranking today and see how you’re doing compared to your competition!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, The Internets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.