Forum Moderators: bakedjake
a) page views per month
b) Alexa traffic rank
Don't name the site. If we can get 50-100 responses across a wide range of traffic rank then we should be able to draw a scatter plot and draw a reasonable line of best fit.
I'll start:
Site 1
a) 12,400
b) 340,000
Site 2
a) 3,000,000
b) 23,900
Next... :)
www.marketing-strategy.info/alexachart.html
but this could be improved if the chart was on a log scale like the original sillyjokes one. To my eye, the line of best fit doesn't seem to fit the data very well.
a) 38,240 <- this is the 3 months average.
b) 71,408
HTH,
-gs
a)190'000
b)110'000
Why do I always have to be an outlier?
63,000 page views
Alexa rank 625,00
I have a lot of different sites that are consistant within those sort of figures , but do not appear to produce anything like the sort of rankings claimed on WebmasterWorld forums
A UK site with over twice the pageviews of the above(ie around 125,000) climbs to the dizzy heights of 450,000. While a more international site with the same page views as this one gets to 225,000 on Alexa. And a third with again the same sort of page views is around 400,000
You can probably appreciate why I have little regard for Alexa rankings :(
<I do not have an Alexa toolbar!>
However, on another site that I'm involved with, going from 300 to 20,000 pages listed in Google (solved a dynamic page crawling problem) shifted our traffic up from 2000 sessions a day to up to 20000 sessions a day and moved our traffic rank from 140k to about 15k. We're now getting enough traffic to be hit by a significant number of Alexa toolbar users. Our traffic rank graph now mirrors our actual site traffic from day to day pretty well.
I think it's a useful guide once you've entered into the top 100,000.
I know that, so that's why I added that I did not have one ;) It may also be that non USA users are less likely to use Alexa toolbars, but I cannot substantiate that.
>>I think it's a useful guide once you've entered into the top 100,000.
However if you look at say post #4 here with 38,000 page views getting into Alexa top 100,000. While I find a site with around 4 times the number of page views barely scrapes into their top 500,000.
It is basically that "conventional thinking" of Alexa being eal at top 100,000 that I am questioning. It appears to me that the "real" value on Alexa probably comes around top 25,000 to 50,000 rather than at top 100,000
Yes, I didn't think you would like that ;)
I have a lot of sympathy with your original post, but it seems like searching for the holy grail - you know it's there but damned if you can find it.
In theory it should be possible to calibrate web traffic from the info floating round.
However the web seems to be so large, that even large sites have stats skewed by who has an Alexa bar. If we cannnot "calibrate" the web from Alexa, then the only other person that could do so is Google ;)
Alexa ranked somewhere in the rang of 2,500,000th until about two months ago. Their rankings aren't useful to anybody who knows what they are doing but I do link to our raking page on our rate card.
SAD! I know I'm a skewer on the scale because my users are very paranoid about security and would never install a toolbar that explicitly tracks their usage. I'm lucky I register on Alexa at all... of course, it is still useful to compare to other sites with the same topic.
I look at it as a useful comparative tool. Compare your site with competitors or look at sites where you might want to exchange links with and might get some traffic from.
Just a bit of harmless fun
Just a bit of harmless fun.
For a lot of people it is not really all that harmless.
I have had companies tell me things like, I can't have an xml feed because my alexa rating is not high enough, or they won't pay for a listing/sponsorship because my competitor has a higher alexa rating. I figure for every person who mentions my alexa number there are at least 10 who look at and don't let me know.
So, very once in awhile I have donwload the alexa toolbar and load about 50 pages. That's all it takes to boost my ratings.
By the way things, things are getting worse. Falsely inflated alexa numbers are now spouted on just about every eBay website auction.
The concept behind this thread won't work, because it doesn't take all the data into account. Data such as number of page views per person. I also think they may be looking at referral strings and working that in as a QA test.
However, since I have a much better ranking than any closer competitor, of course I use it on the rate cards.
unfortunately very few people understand just how crappy Alexa's data are, but they still make business decisons based upon them.
Well of course I agree that it's impossible to get precise figures by back-calculating in this way, but it would be handy to be able to get a ballpark figure for "I think my competitor is getting similar traffic to me, 10 times as much, 100 times as much" etc. If you're only interested in very general figures like that, as I am, then these calibration graphs can be useful.
For one of the sites I work with, our daily TR is now around 10k and 3 month average just catching up. Our competitors are mostly between 10k and 30k with one at about 2k and one at about 500. I want to know a vague figure for how much more traffic the 2k site and the 500 site have than we do.
For my other site, all the competitors are between 50k and 400k so there's not much in the way of a conclusion that you can draw.
They have shot up from nothing to a ranking of about 5'000 in 3 months!
Also while your there read a few reviews.
If you can be bothered to compare their 'old' domain name, jsearch.co.uk....makes some interesting reading.
If they can surely anyone who can be bothered to get an alexa ranking under 10'000 could!?
Although Alexa is VERY rough and ready, we are starting to be able to see heavily skewed results and knock them out of the list. The only alternative to Alexa that I know of is Hitwise - COOL STUFF if you have a spare US$10,000 per year to see PART of the data. Somehow, not all of our clients are willing to spend that kind of dosh. But then... since nobody else has it, I guess they can charge what they like. Fortunately they still need me to interpret it.
Dixon.
Have you considered plotting the x-axis as a log scale? It would move the points away from the origin and make the graph much easier to read. Just a thought...
The "closest fit" formula is really Excel's "best effort".
