Practical eCommerce

athanasiusrc · **Date:** Thu Mar 29, 2007 10:24 pm **Subject:** Can you trust Alexa?

For the past couple of years our Alexa traffic rankings have hovered around 250,000 after being up around 30,000 in 2004. I have never understood this since our traffic and sales have been increasing, not decreasing. This past week our traffic rank skyrocketed up to 80,000. Did we experience a flood of new customers? Did we get linked to by some really big sites? Nope. The only thing we did was move our site to a new server. The site is much faster than before but we did not do anything that should have improved our traffic ranking by a multiple of three. Do I trust Alexa? Nope. Am I glad our "ranking" is improving? Yep. I just wish I could explain why.

simonlilly · **Date:** Tue Apr 03, 2007 9:53 am **Subject:**

As far as I know Alexa's atats are purely driven by users that have the Alexa Toolbar installed. So they may have promoted the Toolbar to a new sector/community where some of your potential/current customers are part of to cause this increase?

The other alternative is that they have modified the way it tracks its users? I guess only Alexa really knows.

athanasiusrc · **Date:** Tue Apr 03, 2007 10:28 am **Subject:**

I guess it's possible that Alexa started heavily promoting their toolbar to Catholics who like shopping at our site on the same day we moved our servers.

You would think that an increase in our ranking by a multiple of 3 would also result in traffic and sales to match but it hasn't.

bgetting · **Date:** Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:28 pm **Subject:** Alexa can be unreliable

One important thing to realize with Alexa is that it has some limitations in it's data collection. The first, as touched on above, is that they collect their data via the "Alexa Toolbar", which is bundled with Internet Explorer. Firefox users can also download and install a version.

For this reason, Alexa's data is automatically skewed towards Windows users, as nobody on an Apple uses Internet Explorer (at least not a version that has the toolbar installed). While this generally reflects a majority of web users, if your site is geared towards mac users, or you have a loyal user base of mac users, you can expect that traffic to be ignored by Alexa.

Also, for some reason, Alexa seems to be heavily influenced by traffic trend in Korea and other places in Asia. While they claim that this also reflects the large number of Internet users in Asia, there is something going on there. I'm not sure what, but Korea seems to be unusually influential in Alexa ratings.

Finally, Alexa's accuracy is logrhythmic. In english, this means that the closer your traffic rank is to 0 (zero), the more accurate the data about your site is. In fact, if you are not in the top 100,000 as far as traffic rankings, your Alexa data is nearly completely unreliable. Once you have breached the top 100,000, your data becomes relatively stable and can be used for DELETED. The closer you move to 0 (the better your ranking) the more accurate your data becomes.

Hopefully this helps a little. Here is a shot of your traffic rank over the last 5 years (from Alexa):

Alexa Traffic Rank Graph (5 year)

You can see that something happened at the end of 2003 for about a year that was really helping you out. Can you identify anything from that time that might have been generating that kind of traffic? Here is the graph for five years of your reach (percentage of Internet users that visit your site):

Alexa Reach Graph (5 year)

Again, it looks like something happened at the end of 2003 to generate a bunch of interest, which has been waning since.

simonlilly · **Date:** Thu Apr 05, 2007 12:56 am **Subject:**

As far as I know Alexa toolbar isn't bundled with Internet Explorer 7 as standard. This may vary with some ISPs and what is installed when you setup your internet connection or a new PC.

I really wouldn't use Alexa for any kind of quality statistical comparison of your site alone. Get something like Google Anayltics setup. This is far more reliable and will give you alot more useful information about visitors and traffic trends.

athanasiusrc · **Date:** Thu Apr 05, 2007 6:22 am **Subject:**

We use DELETED and smarterstats for traffic DELETED. I just find Alexa entertaining.

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