What Use is Alexa?

Or, 101, 58, 23… 2 uses for Alexa

One of the biggest problems in the world of online marketing is accurately estimating the traffic of a website without having access to the website statistics or server logs. Say for example you want to pay for an ad on a content site, and wonder how much you should offer; you’ll need to know how many page views your ad will receive. What are the most trafficked sites to advertise on? How do you find this out?

You can of course ask the owner of the website in question, but you’re going on their word as you’ll never truly know if they’re over estimating their traffic levels or not.

Amazon.com owned website Alexa has for years been providing traffic levels for websites, for free, for anyone that wants to see them. Alexa allows you to compare websites with each other to see which sites get the most visitors, have the most page views, and have the greatest reach.

The trouble is however Alexa’s traffic estimator is utterly unreliable. Alexa relies on users having the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser in order to collate data from which websites you explore, and it’s a Western website so the data for Alexa is heavily skewed towards American websites.

What isn’t on the Internet eh?

The toolbar also only works for IE, though there is a mod version for Firefox which works, if you ever wanted to install it. This again means that Alexa’s data is skewed to Americans who install toolbars on their Internet Explorer browsers.

Not exactly a broad demographic.

Therefore no actual credence can be given to the data Alexa generates, at least not if you’re trying to accurately estimate the traffic for a website. In fact, simply installing the toolbar yourself and visiting your website a few times per day will increase your Alexa ranking by several hundred thousand; it’s that useless!

So useless in fact that the site is universally condemned by SEOs everywhere and anyone who references its data or asks about the validity of its data is pointed at harshly, and laughed at wholeheartedly.

But does it have any use at all? Well, it might surprise you to hear that it does. Firstly, Alexa is used by less savvy marketing types when looking for websites to purchase their links. I have been approached personally in the past and had the Alexa rank of one of my website mentioned in the bartering of link prices.

An irrelevant statistic it may be, but useful for validating your prices with the ill informed.

Secondly many automated websites that offer money for content also use Alexa to determine how much they will pay, probably because their target audience is the very same user base Alexa benefits from; Americans with a penchant for installing toolbars. Sites such as reviewme.com use Alexa and Technorati to calculate your bid price for your website.

All of this means it’s well worthwhile installing the Alexa toolbar, getting all of your staff and friends to install it, and generally using it as a matter of course when viewing your own website. Be careful when doing this though because the Alexa toolbar will also monitor any sub-domains of your website that you visit, so if you have sub-domains that you don’t want other people seeing as they’re just for internal use – Alexa will see and publish them!

There is one other use for Alexa as well that doesn’t revolve around abusing its easy to manipulate subscriber base. It does show you topical changes in searches and traffic for websites. For example, if you look at the traffic for Wimbledon.org you’ll see a huge spike in the run up to, and during the rain splattered tournament:

This one wasn’t exactly rocket science to predict of course, but the principle is sound. If you’re looking to advertise on a website that focuses on something seasonal you can check its rankings with Alexa for the previous year and see if it featured a spike during the time period in question. If it did, it’s safe to assume that it ranks in search engines and does get found when people are searching for the topic. If it didn’t receive a spike in traffic, don’t bother with it.

So there you have it, not exactly 101 uses for Alexa, but as close as we’re going to get; 2.

Darren
SEO Programmer

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1 Comment

1. My website http://www.fortunehotels.in isn’t having good position in Alexa. I have downloaded alexa toolbar & placed alexa widgets on the website but no improvement there. Even I read on many sites that alexa widget, redirections are myth. Is that true? I need your feedbacks. Visit here to see http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in alexa traffic ranking of fortunehotels.in

   Comment by martinlock October 30, 2007 @ 11:45 am

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