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
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
