The Big Alexa Myth
As webmasters, we all like to know who sends us traffic and how we measure up to the competition. For many, the de facto source is Alexa. It is the oldest and most well known of the website ranking services. In addition, you see experienced and well established webmasters mentioning it often when discussing how popular a website is.
Believe it or not, if you think Alexa provides the most accurate data, it is a myth.
Alexa’s Ranking System.
When determining how popular a website is, you try to count all the visits from humans excluding automated traffic (robots, spiders, etc.). The question is, how does a third-party website get an accurate count of all the visits to potentially millions of websites. Well, there is a simple answer for Alexa.
Alexa has a toolbar for users to install on their web browser. The toolbar sends data to Alexa counting each web request a user makes. So, if a user doesn’t have the toolbar, Alexa cannot count the traffic. While the traffic counts are absolutely accurate, it creates two problems.
- The installed base of Alexa toolbar users doesn’t reflect total internet traffic.
- Alexa traffic statistics can be easily manipulated.
For these reasons, Alexa sometimes shows wildly inaccurate data, compared to other services, when displaying the traffic for a website. We’ll look at an example shortly. But, first, let’s cover the alternatives.
Other tracking services.
I am going to give you a great site for finding webmaster info, it is popuri.us. This site was recommended on one of the webmaster forums, and it introduced me to compete.com and quantcast.
Compete.com doesn’t have the traffic history Alexa offers, which goes back years. However, it displays the visitor count a website gets (compared to Alexa’s traffic reach). This is nice when you are trying to determine traffic patterns for relatively small websites (less than 10,000 monthly uniques).
Quantcast is an amazing resource if you are doing competitive analysis. They provide a breakdown of visitor patterns by age, gender, income, household, and ethnicity. Plus, it provides a list showing sites the typical visitor is most likely to use (or affinity). So, if you want to know where people go once they leave a site, quantcast tells you.
Do they measure up?
With these additional tracking services, let’s see how they compare to Alexa when measuring website traffic. Since Alexa doesn’t provide specific traffic counts, two websites will be used to show the differences between the services.
For this example, webmasterworld.com and forums.digitalpoint.com will be used.
In Alexa, webmasterworld.com has a reach of about 1200 while forums.digitalpoint.com has a reach of 2000. That’s almost a double.
In compete.com, the traffic is reversed with webmasterworld.com getting 800K uniques to forums.digitalpoint.com’s 700K.
Quantcast has webmasterworld.com at almost 220,000 uniques with forums.digitalpoint.com at 113K.
As you see, there are big differences between the different tracking services. And… only compete and Quantcast agree webmasterworld.com has more traffic, but the disparity of “how much” is huge!
Getting the most from tracking services.
It’s clear there are huge disparities in how the different services count traffic. Does that mean you should ignore one over another? NO! Instead, use them all. Each has services the others lack. Alexa has a nice search engine which you can use to find all kinds of good information. Compete has a great keyword finding service. Quantcast shines with its “affinities” section.
Instead of relying on just one service to get an idea of how popular a website is, use them all to provide a more complete picture of how a particular website performs.
Popularity: 2% [?]
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment