Here is my Alexa ranking and actual traffic stats

What is yours.

[gabby]

My site ranks 189,000 on Alexa.

My own internal logs showing actual visitors reveals my site receives 23 unique visitors daily, on average.

What are your statistics and ranking? Lets get a rough idea of what the Alexa numbers mean.

[diamondgrl]

I guarantee you that 23 unique users a day does not typically translate into a 189,000 ranking on Alexa. I have one site that ranks 211,000 and has 7000 unique users a day.

I assume you have the toolbar yourself, which might explain those numbers. In any case, it shows you how screwed up the numbers are.

[moishe]

around 250 unique a day, Alexa - 1,600,000 on one of my sites

[monkeythumpa]

I was up to about 90,000 on Alexa a few weeks ago with about 100 uniques/day. I uninstalled the tool bar and, let me check with Alexa . . . now I am down to 133,000. Alexa ranking is not very accurate unless you have a ranking under 8-10,000.

[Matt Probert]

Beware believing the term "unique visitors". Most people falsely believe that unique IP addresses, or different IP adresses relate to visitors. They don't. Some ISPs, such as AOL, issue different IP addresses for every request, so a page with 100 images could find as many as 101 differnt IP addresses accessing it during a "session", but really only one person.

On the other hand, Alexa tracks it's users via the toolbar, and so knows how many different Alexa users access a page.

The Alexa page rank is also not solely based upon the number of people visiting a site, but also takes into consideration how many different pages they access during a session.

Anyway, our Alexa rank is about 25,000 and we get an estimated 1 million different people a month accessing the site (based upon Alexa page views per Alexa user and total page views supplied by our advertising tracking partners).

Matt

[figment88]

not very accurate unless you have a ranking under 8-10,000

I even question that. With the growth of firefox, Alexa is getting even worse.

Isn't it time for Amazon to throw in the towel on Alexa? For a company that does so many things well, Alexa is really a blight on their reputation. Why would they want to be associated with such garbage.

[monkeythumpa]

Here is how Alexa calculates traffic:

# of Alexa Toolbars that visited your site / % of browsers with Alexa installed = Alexa Traffic Estimate

Since Alexa uses statistics to calculate the traffic, the more traffic, the more accurate the results. I don't see why Firefox would skew the results. Amazon knows how many people use/don't use their toolbar to a pretty accurate level.

[txbakers]

What's Alexa? Why should I care what some spyware thinks of my popularity?

[dcheney]

Normally my site ranks around 100,000 - but in the last month it jumped into under 10,000 a few times due to some one time news events. I did have some large traffic spikes, but there doesn't seem to be a solid relationship between my data and theirs.

[figment88]

monkeythumpa, that is not even close to how Alexa estimates traffic.

txbakers, most webmasters do not need concern themselves at all with Alexa. In some areas, though, competitors will use, misuse, and abuse Alexa rankings to take sales.

[dataguy]

7,000 Alexa rating: 3,000 unique IP's per day (We only measure unique IP's).

Alexa may not be totally accurate, but what's the alternative? My toolbar stopped working for about a week early this month and I felt like I was surfing the web blind-folded.

[Leosghost]

What's Alexa? Why should I care what some spyware thinks of my popularity?

.!

I gotta stop lookin in here late at night with a glass of wine in my hand ..another keyboard soaked in red ...TXbakers ...thanks ;)...

[dataguy]

What's Alexa? Why should I care what some spyware thinks of my popularity?

And that's the crux of it right there... I don't care what it thinks of my popularity, I care what it thinks of yours.

[Leosghost]

But as it doesn't know "squat" about "squat" ...( apart from yourself and some others who have yet to see the light )...who gives a....

Move on to more relevant things ...

I presume Tx' concurs ..?

[txbakers]

sure do.

it's spyware as far as I'm concerned and does nothing to prove any popularity. I'll check my bank balance to see how well I'm doing.

[monkeythumpa]

that is not even close to how Alexa estimates traffic

So figment, I am curious how you think they calculate traffic.

[Ecmast]

Agree with you Monkeythumpa. That's how it is done.

My site attracts only 50 vistors a day. None of them probably have alexa toolbar installed. I installed Alexa and checked my site atleast 10 times a day for about a month. My rankings jumped up to about the 250,000 level. I removed the toolbar and my rankings dropped to about 4 million after a month of uninstalling the toolbar.

[RailMan]

it's been interesting watching my alexa rankings improve over the last year or so - and watching my competitors rankings change as well - but like others i prefer to measure success by my bank balance .......

strangely alexa has stopped ranking my site now - the "Today" figures just show double hyphen instead of a figure .......... 5,000,000 here i come!

[figment88]

monkeythumpa, why should I paraphrase their process. You can go to the Alexa site and read about their ranking process.

Pay particular attention to their use of pageviews and the fact that Alexa toolbar is only available for IE browsers on windows operating system.

[bumpaw]

With the growth of firefox, alexa is getting even worse.

This may or may not be true but last night I found a nice extension for Firefox called SearchStatus 1.6. It gives Alexa and Google PR in the status bar. You can get quick Whois through it also. Google for it as it's not on the Firefox site.

[DXL]

Alexa Rank: Around 25,000. Unique Visitors: ~1000/day

[Rollo]

Alexa ratings are crap and dangerous crap at that... they have a hijacking issue that has gotten a lot of attention here. I block them in the robots.txt.

[derekwong28]

A good Alexa ranking is easy to fake but a poor one is not. If a site has a poor ranking, it does put me off. Therefore it could affect the conversion rates of sites with very low rankings.

[crescenta]

The Alexa ranking on one of my sites is below 200,000, but it gets about 2,500 unique visitors a day. Another site gets a little over 1,000 unique visitors a day. Its Alexa rating is a tad above 500,000.

Yeah, I'd agree that the Alexa rankings don't tell you a whole lot about a site's actual traffic.

[Lordo]

I will tell you a story.

Last month I launched a website for ranking some sites and calculating their stats. Thus, most visitors are webmasters. And of course, most of webmasters have alexa toolbar to see their rankings and increase it.
My site gets about 5000 page views a day from around 900 visitors.

My alexa ranking today is: 6,000 :)

Only because my visitors have alexa toolbar can't be a real scale.

[alexaranking]

<snip>

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:43 pm (utc) on May 24, 2005]
[edit reason] no spam with our posts please. [/edit]

[Natashka]

I don't have Alexa toolbar, absolutely agree: it's a spyware and will never install it. Just wondering, why on some topics lots of visitors have this piece of spyware installed and sites on this topic get better ranking, while on other topics most traffic comes without Alexa toolbar.

What kind of ppl install this toolbar?

[robotsdobetter]

I don't even know why any webmaster is still looking at Alexa traffic stats, it's not accurate by far. Most internet users don't know what the Alexa toolbar is. How many internet surfers really care about how much traffic a web site gets? Very few and the few are webmasters. Many spyware programs consider the Alexa toolbar spyware and removes it, so there goes your normal internet user with a spyware removal program.

They don't. Some ISPs, such as AOL, issue different IP addresses for every request, so a page with 100 images could find as many as 101 differnt IP addresses accessing it during a "session", but really only one person.

That's not true about AOL, AOL only does that with some users, however, once they log off most do get a new IP number.

What kind of ppl install this toolbar?

Mostly web site owners.

[dataguy]

What kind of ppl install this toolbar?

Yeah, and I can't understand what kind of people would allow those @^#$ spyware cookies....