Alexa accuracy?

showing figures very different from our traffic logs

[Namaste]

Yesterday Alexa was showing us a top 10,000 site.

Today it's closer to 20,000, we actually have much more traffic today then yesterday (or day before).

Is Alexa prone to these errors, or am I missing something?

[ncw164x]

The alexa results relate to visitors who have the alexa toolbar installed therefore if visitors to your site use this toolbar your ranking will go down.

The results can only be used as a guide and not taken seriously especially when you can install an alexa booster program on your desktop and adjust the stats yourself, but by doing that your only kidding yourself...

[joeduck]

I've also seen Alexa vary wildly when my own stats are stable. Also, I think their sampling method only uses Alexa Toolbar data, so if you use the toolbar on several computers in your office you'll tend to have a very favorable rating. I've also heard that Alexa is on more SE Asia computers and therefore may bias towards those sites. I'm amazed how Alexa has become something of a informal ranking standard without employing any checks on these major sampling problems.

[AcsCh]

The daily traffic on Alexa seems to be delayed by about 1-2 day. We have a site with heavy weekday traffic, and pretty little on weekends, so Alexa shows worst rankings mondays, when the stats show most traffic.

[beauzero]

Its also a statistical average of their users. Think about where people would be able to download Alexa and how that same customer segment fits into your personal company profile.

[Huckleberry]

So why put any weight in something that someone has to download a toolbar to register any site stat for the page being viewed... what is the percentage of people using the toolbar to the percentage of people viewing the web... are there better ways to look at actually rankings and such, I know that google's PR is not really that accurate since it can be manipulated, so what is there then.

[perfectlover]

Norton says Alexa is a SPYWARE :) and yes it is.
Thrat level : High