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Now I know what everyone is about to start spouting off “this is old news” and “we already know this”. Well then this post is not for you. But unfortunately I come across a very large number of people who still use this tool as a metric to judge a website. If you are one of these people please read on.
Just recently I had a client ask me why their alexa rank dropped off of the map. My answer was pretty brief I simply said to him Alexa Sucks and is the worse thing to use to judge the metrics on your site. Sure I am guilty of sometime going and look at my alexa rank but to be completely honest I never, let me repeat, I never take it seriously.
For everyone who does here is a very short report on how far off the metrics on Alexa are.
I first went to Quantcast and found 2 websites that were Quantified, for anyone that doesn’t know what that means, it means that these 2 websites voluntarily placed the Quantcast code onto their site (just like Google analytics) and they have a direct visitor count coming back to their site, not an estimate.
The first site that I chose to use was a well known Christian bookstore parable.com and here are their metrics on Quantcast:
As you can see parable gets around 3.9k global visits per day. Now lets look at parable’s Alexa rank.
So as you can see they get 3.9K in global traffic and they are in 235,030 place in Alexa.
So my next metric was taken off of wolf-howl.com. wolf-howl.com is run by SEO/internet marketer Michael Gray. According to Quantcast he has the following (again his site is Quantified)
As you can see he is receiving 1.6K global visits a day. This is approximately 43.2% of the traffic that parable receives. Moving right along lets see what alexa has to say about this
Wow, if that isn’t off then I really don’t know what is. According to Alexa’s reach metric wolf-howl.com gets about 3 times more traffic than parable.
Now I know what a lot of people will say, that they are not in the same category (as far as businesses) so they are not in direct competition with each other nor do they receive the same type of visitors (obviously wolf-howl.com receives more people with the Alexa toolbar). But I am not the one categorizing them, Alexa is. As far as Alexa is concerned everyone is in the same category because they use the same metric to measure your sites popularity regardless if you are a Christian bookstore or an SEO company. By doing this they have seriously skewed the results. Now one way that Alexa would be able to make this just a tad bit more accurate (its never gonna be perfect) would be to categorize websites. You would get a better result if everything was categorized. Again it’s never gonna be nowhere near perfect but at least it would improve this joke that they call a traffic metric.
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Well, the issue comes into whom do you trust with your data. In this case you are installing tracking code on a site & that domain knows whom & how many are exactly coming to the site.
I see what you are going at here. But, you will always see a better result, more accuracy occurring when you are using direct, accurate numbers that do a tally based of IP. It’s log that is visualized.
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