A Short Primer on Alexa...
And How It Relates To Your SBI! Site

Alexa.com is an Amazon-owned, Google-powered Search Engine that measures traffic-popularity based on a sampling of about 10 million users.

We at SiteSell are firm believers in Alexa and use their ranking scores to support the value and effectiveness of Site Build It!...

http://traffic-test.sitesell.com/

http://results.sitesell.com/

No other site-tracking system has more users. However, it does have certain limitations that you have to watch out for.

First of all, what is Alexa totally useless for?

Answer... measuring your own traffic. You have a far more reliable tool in your own traffic stats, which tell you with great precision how many visitors you're getting. So don't be depressed by a score of 1,000,000 if you have 5,000 visitors per day. (Obviously, this example is not likely to happen!)

What is Alexa great for?

Answer... Comparing how you are doing against your competitors. The odds are your visitors and their visitors are similar in nature so they likely use Alexa to a similar degree. That means not much bias when you stay within an industry -- but we'll get to bias in a second.

What about overall reliability?

Answer... The occasional site can certainly get weird results with a good Alexa ranking but with only a low number of visitors. Often that can be due to something like the user having the Alexa toolbar and a dynamic ISP (i.e., your ISP address changes whenever you log in to use the Net) which can fool Alexa into thinking you are getting many more visitors than you really are -- especially, if you also delete cookies frequently. Or yes, within certain limits, a person can manipulate a score to appear better than they really are, but again... within limits.

Overall, the correlation of "visitor counts" vs. "Alexa ranking" (across thousands of sites) is good. SiteSell knows because we run scripts comparing the two on thousands of SBI! sites.

Is the correlation perfect? Not really, there is a great deal of "scatter" (extreme examples -- an Alexa 150,000 ranking with only 20 visitors per day, or an Alexa 500,000 site with 5,000 visitors per day). The scatter makes correlation almost totally useless after a 500,000 ranking, except for one general exception -- anyone with a ranking of 1,000,000 or worse (i.e., higher) is simply not getting much traffic, if any.

Overall, if you plot those thousands of sites on an "Alexa vs. visitor-count" graph, there is a good correlation and it is a very clearly a worthwhile tool, as long as you understand a little probability theory and how Alexa works. And you don't get shaken up by "one-of" reports of how someone or other manipulated Alexa, etc. Who cares?

Bottom line?

There is no point to manipulating Alexa since it's your own actual visitor count, that matters. And who are you fooling, anyway? Only the cynical and dishonest would do that and claim that others do it. There is just no point, unless you're the same type of person who used to put a fake cell phone antenna on your car to "look good." ;-)

Here's a great "primer" on how Alexa works and calculates their numbers....

http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html?p=DestNew_W_t_40_M1

But the most interesting information (for this discussion) is their section headed Some Important Disclaimers.

Yes, there is bias, as there is for any sampling by any sampling device or service. The two bugbears of any sampling are statistical error and bias, and the key is to understand each and know how to account for it while using it. So let's look at each...

1) Statistical Error

Alexa has the lowest statistical error, since it has by far the largest sample base generating data for it (10,000,000).

Alexa is very clear that stats on sites with traffic rankings greater than 100,000 are less statistically valid. SiteSell's own studies show "better and better" correlation with "better and better" Alexa rankings, "good" correlation down to the 300,000 mark, and "decent" to about the 500,000 level.

But that's not important. Here's the key point...

It's hard (and pointless) to skew the results of the kind of traffic generated by the top 100K -- not unless you are a sophisticated, nasty manipulator hitting Alexa with the toolbar from a large number of ISPs scattered around the globe, in an automated fashion, rotating ISPs, etc. We have not seen that (inside 100K with near-zero visitors) in SBI! and we would find such a claim dubious.

Special Note: Do not focus on getting a better Alexa score. An Alexa score is merely a good comparison tool. Focus on visitor count in your traffic stats and good things will follow.

Back to manipulation concerns... It likely is possible to "fool" Alexa to get to 500K or so, very rarely even to 150K -- that would be tough to do, though, without at least decent traffic. But, in any event, what's the point?

The really good use of Alexa is to track your performance vs. your competitors. There's no point in having a high Alexa score just to have a high Alexa score -- it won't bring you an ounce more of business.

Another good URL...

http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/new.html

2) Bias

Bias? Certainly. Two obvious examples...

Korea -- We don't know why (our guess is that the Korean browser may have Alexa installed), but there is a reason beyond the one given on the Alexa site for so many Korean sites to score so highly.

Net marketing -- absolutely. A higher percentage of our visitors, just like BeFree or PayPal users or bCentral, would likely have Alexa installed. They are more likely to know about, and to be interested in this kind of data.

But scan through the Top 100 English sites at Alexa...

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang=en

.... or the top 50 business sites...

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?catid=3&ts_mode=subject&lang=none

Surprise! They are not all Net marketing sites. Other people use Alexa... or at least Net marketers visit other sites, too, depending on how you care to look at it.

And as you can see... those sites are pretty well known. The better the ranking, the more reliable it is.

In any event, regardless of statistics and bias...

Alexa remains a great way for you to track how you are doing within your industry. For this, Alexa jumps from "good" to "excellent."

Why does SiteSell use it so much? Two reasons...

1) It establishes our credibility. SiteSell has grown very fast and that can only happen for one reason... a terrific product that really does build Web sites that work. Alexa is an objective way to demonstrate that growth, comparing ourselves to others in our competitive space.

For example, a few years ago, SiteSell.com's ranking was 13-20,000, while others in our space were 500-1000. Now go to Alexa and compare us against competitors. You can do a direct graphical compare between two sites at Alexa (** blue underlined Alexa) by...

STEP 1) Find your own ranking

STEP 2) Click on "Traffic Details"

STEP 3) Enter the other site into the box "Compare".

You'll get a wonderful graph plotting the two sites for a period of 3 months to 2 years (your choice).

Here's a good one to compare SiteSell vs. Microsoft's bCentral...

http://hardgoods.sitesell.com/img/sitesell-bcentral.png

Alexa provides objective third party transparency. SiteSell does not have any more or less advantage re Alexa than bCentral, PayPal or other small biz Net marketing oriented sites.

2) Using Alexa also establishes the success of SBI! users...

http://proof.sitesell.com/

These folks score well because they have the visitor count to back it up. It's just not possible to fake a page like that. We don't "build up" sites to have high counts -- it would be impossible to do that for the hundreds of sites on results.sitesell.com in any event, and simply not worth our time. After a SiteSell visitor clicks on a button or two (and most never do, by the way), they "get the idea" and never click again. No... the Alexa scores really do indicate how fantastically well SBI! users do.

So what's your take-home lesson?

Track your own internal traffic stats through the Site Build It! TrafficCenter. Use Alexa to give you that "big picture" perspective as to how you're doing within your industry. All the information that you need is on the Alexa site.

Bookmark it and visit periodically.