Forum Moderators: phranque
A composite traffic ranking is shown on the toolbar when you visit a site. Clicking on the Alexa rankings number, will take you to information about the site you are visiting.
I wanted to bring up the topic because I feel the traffic measurement by the Alexa toolbar is one of the most powerful and accurate measures of internet statistics I've seen yet.
Many of the other net ratings systems rely on sampling a group of selected users. Often, those users put something in between their machine and the internet that tracks what sites they visit. That is highly accurate for those people, but the sample rates are so low that the data is suspect when applied to the world wide audidence of the net. Some of the net ratings firms use sample groups of only one thousand to two thousand surfers. I feel they are statistically invalid. If it were anyone but the companies behind those ratings numbers, they would be discarded as noncredible.
The Alexa toolbar on the other hand, has a reported install base of several million. That is a significant group of people. Even so, Alexa does warn that certain sites and sectors of the net could be under reported or over reported. Factors such as Alexa's own site where a high percentage of users will have the tool bar installed, or linux heavy sites where few will have the toolbar installed will be over or under reported.
In the past, the Alexa Toolbar has been a source of controversy. Much of that upset has died away with the acceptability of tools like Netscapse "What's Related", the Google and Yahoo toolbars. When you visit a site, the url is transmitted to the homebase in order to return the site information.
Alexa is also connected with Archive.org [archive.org] (Wayback). You can click on a button to see the history of any page.
There is also an "auto site suggestion" while you surf. The Alexa Toolbar Related Links are provided on the toolbar to related sites. I think this is one area where they need to do more work. It has to be a fairly high traffic site in order to become accurate on the suggestions.
The search feature of the alexa toolbar is powered by Google and can be installed at the same time as the Google bar. I think the traffic figure is better at determining site quality than Googles page rank. But taken together, it is a powerful synthesis of data available while surfing.
Alexa Info for webmasters [pages.alexa.com]
Download and install the Alexa toolbar: [download.alexa.com...]
According to statistics theory it is possible to accurately predict large populations to 95% accuracy (+ or - 5%) with only a few hundred results (about 384). ie with a sample size of 384 we can make a survey that if taken multiple times will have a 95% chance of acheiving the same result each time within + or - 5% difference in the ranking each time.
Yes that's the idea when a sample is Randomly selected. But this sample has major sampling errors. It doesn't come even close to a scientific random sample. When the results are as prone to error as this, making the sample size bigger does very very little to help make the results more reliable.
I agree with Brett that as sites become less popular, reliability is poor. But i disagree that relaibility for top sites are useful.
On one side it is great that there is something that is something more international than the mainstream Us user tracking systems like NetRatings etc. On the other side, I refuse to believe that Korean sites, when only a small population in the world can speak Korean, appear so many times in the top 50, though i can belive the Chinese and Japanese domain representation if we look at their relative on-line populations. This is the best tell tale that we are looking at a very unrepresentative sample.
Now the buzz is out via WebmasterWorld, expect Alexa to head to be the spam capital of the world, unless they fix up their tracking algos. That said, given it's significant sampling problems, is it really worth it?
I also note they do hav a disclaimer re hits to the Alexa site. I dont however see the same for Amazon, which also have a significant built in positive error.
On another positive side, it seems from a brief look, that they removed the major anomaly that small amateur sites from communities like geocities for example "inherited" the popularity of geocities popularity as a whole, which could have been misleading for many.
The best that any serious researcher could say about the integrity of the Alexa rating, is that it *could* be a good indicator of the popularity of sites for Alexa tool bar users. Until we know the profile of an "Alexa user" we cannot make any assumptions of what populations these results can be generalized to.
if you can excuse a break into speculation I would estimate the sample as being skewed towards grographic markets that Alexa target, Alexa partners, webmasters and internet professionals, individal and home users rather than business users, high speed users that dont mind their downlaod time being increased, people who like cluttered browsers and gadgets, IE users, and people that love statistics.
> Traffic Rank is going down, although our traffic has increased about 50% in a month
Traffic rank is relative global usage not specific site performance.
Well, if it's relative to global usage, that means that although we have doubled our traffic in the last 3 months, worlwide global internet usage has increased even more (although 70%), so our traffic rank has go down relatively to global usage ¬¬ Well, call me sceptical, but I think Alexa is not a good ranking tool even for sites like ours, with more than 100K users a month.
According to Alexa there are millions of people using the toolbar. I suspect this will be a fairy representative sample of web usage.
I sincerely hope that Google will give us tools similar to Alexa that will allow webmasters to accurately track sites performance.
BTW, Korea has one of the highest Internet usages in the world.
YEs I am aware of that as Korea is one of our own key markets. You are absolutely correct on internet use penetration, and South Korea has a population approaching 50 million making it one of the top advanced economy countries in the world, but the relevant stat in this case is online populations that use the local language.
From very hazy memory, the US, Japan, China and Germany (and maybe UK) have larger online populations and several others have similar, but I dont see Japan, China and Germany anywhere close in representation on Alexa to that of South Korea.
According to Alexa there are millions of people using the toolbar. I suspect this will be a fairy representative sample of web usage.
Again you are getting "representativeness" and sample size mixed up. I can poll millions of people worldwide who wear glasses and go to church every sunday, but their opinions will not be representative of the population as a whole, no matter how many of this type of people I recruit, or even if i ask every one (practically impossible as it is is). We WILL know however, the opinions of bespectacled church goers.
"millions"?
2 million or 50 million? That stat is quite vague. Does it count people who have downlaoded the software or those that use it on a regular basis. Ive downloaded the google toolbar around 6 times and Alex 4 times, but used them each time for a couple of days then unisntalled them.
Do i count as 4 "users" to Alexa or "4 downloads". Like in many claims of program usage, download counts are only one factor in estimating usage.
Agreed the more people you sample the higher proportion they are of the population and the closer you get to the truth. But proper sampling can mean you get more reliable stats. OK estimates vary of population online - about 500 M to 700 M. Even if we are extremely charitable and assime 10 M use Alexa regularly, that is a very small proportion of the on line population, and heaps of space for sample errors to do their dirty work...
As with all the toolbar products, you have to look at what the company providing them is getting out of the deal. Once you have identified this, then you look at whether that toolbar provides you useful information that can help you with you job.
The Google bar does this by providing page rank info I need to ascertain how difficult my competition is on a particular key phrases. This actually gives me information that helps me to improve my visitor numbers. I didn't get the same useful feedback from Alexa, I wasn't actually getting any useful information back from them in terms of improving the site.
A toolbar must provide good information to the user to pick up a long term user base. Without that info the user will install it and uninstall a couple of days later.
It seems to me that a few clickbots could do a very neat job of spamming alexa or maybe a bit of low level information hacking with a good router.
Also you have to think that there is a vast segment of the Adult market which is probably very underrated by Alexa as visitors to those sites will have much greater privacy concerns than the average user.
Alexa recently changed their way of measuring, so that people could not boost their own sites so easily (except www.alexa.com of course :) ) and I saw several major shifts in positions. (Nothing documented, as it is only a guide)
Also, new sites do bounce, and sites I regularly visit can move 20% easily, but that is fine by me.
If you are aware if its limitations, its good.
As for space on your PC, shift the tool bars around abit, and you can make loads of room at the top of your screen for 2 extras. How about the address bar on the top line, on the RHS? Works for me!
Brett, never thought to use the search on it! I will try it!
George
>we have doubled our traffic in the last 3 months, worlwide global internet usage has increased even more, so our traffic rank has gone down relatively to global usage
I cannot disagree with your facts. You seem to make your case.
Just the other day my boss was asking me if there was a way for me to tell him the number of hits our competetors sites were getting. I told him I did not have that information. However, is this alexa traffic ranks a way of gaugeing this information?
If I am at my home page and click the info button on the Alexa toolbar, on that page is a list:
You may be interested in the following products:
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary by William R. Trumble $105.00
The Solution: 6 Winning Ways to Permanent Weight L... by Laurel Mellin $13.00
Body for Life Success Journal by Bill Phillips $18.17
National Geographic Atlas of the World by National
Geographic Society (U.S.) $105.00
A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire 1776-2002 by Simon Schama $28.00
PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling $34.99
AudioLearn : PCAT by Shahrad Yazdani $99.00
The above is the actual cut and paste from that page. This has already changed since my post a bit ago but... still here are the topics of:
1)Oxford Dictionary
2)Britain
3)PHP
which I have only mentioned in this forum. I have not used these words or visited anywhere even remotely connected except here at WW.
Hmm. someone explain this 'traffic rank' to me. Is it hits by month? by year? Impressions of how many times the site came up in a search?
It's explained at:
[pages.alexa.com...]
I see exact same list of books for my website.
Alexa is not using information to recommend books.
We receive alot of web traffic, which suggests that Alexa has to thin of a market sample, and is thus heavily subject to bias.
Also, if I was to take Alexa to heart, then 9 out of the 10 people above me on the top 100 widget website are cheaters also.
Well, I'm off to install the toolbar, visit my competitors sites, and then go surf some pron sites, so that Alexa will tell interested people that the people who like mycompetitor.com also like xxx-xxx.com
Traffic seems to be the only really valuable measure that they can give, because without the use of robots it will be hard to fake 100 000 visits.
Name any other service on the web that has accurate traffic rankings for the top 2000 sites.
This is the only real world tool of it's type on the net. The quality of the data is only going to get better as more people use the tool. None of the other services can say that.
Having used the toolbar constantly for awhile now, I can honestly say, it has changed my approach to the web.
It is also backlash against junk data. I think the other ratings/counter services that put out these big reports are scientifically inaccurate. They don't have the sample rate needed to accuratly measure the web.
I simply do not want to see the same thing happen to the web that has happened to the TV industry ratings. They are an agreed upon lie. The advertisers know they are junk - the networks know they are junk - and they just smile and go along with it as the best available system.
We don't need to do that on the web. We have computers that can accuratly measure - everything! Those that control the numbers are not giving them up. The proxy caches, the search engines, and those in control of the major routers are hording this data for themselves.
The alexa toolbar is the only tool available that put some of that data into the hands of the average surfer.
That would be a revolution! Tranpearent Internet!
Okay, Brett I'm pursuaded. I don't promise to use it that much since it is on my Windows box but I was looking for a replacement for the Googlebar I just ditched. ;)
Thinking: hmm, might want to offer one of these Alexa bars to my visitors. :)
Unless you are pulling enough traffic to be attracting ad buyers the Alexa ranking is not going to be high on your list of targets for improvement and therefore the feedback that the toolbar gives you is of little value.
I can't therefore see any kind of case for running the toolbar.
Although, looking ahead: If the toolbar becomes more widely accepted, these numbers could become more meaningful.
It kept crashing my explorer BTW so I uninstalled.
Alexa is nowhere near Neilson as a Ratings Analysis. Why make that comparison? Can't make that work.
We are a decade away from finding a useful "Neilson-like" tool. Who the heck is downloading the Alexa toolbar? Survey says: _you_fill_the_blanks
Alexa is just plain old darn creepy. If they are pushing my envelope, then they will find it sealed.
Be excited about the immaculate concepts, but these are dirty dogs.
With alexa all the webmaster and techie sites are skewed higher up. Some may think that unix specific sites will be unreported but I do doubt that. I imagine unix themed site visitors are more techie than the average user and many use internet explorer and Windows at home and they know about things like Alexa. When PCDataonline gave its data away for the free trial the top 1000 sites according to them all had more than 1 million visitors a month projected based on US visits only.
I do doubt that sites like webmaster world which happen to manage their way into the top 1000 spot on Alexa have 1 million US visitors a month. Just how many visits does Webmasterworld get monthly a couple hundred thousand at most I would imagine if that.
I compared several sites and it is useful: you can have an idea about traffic: it seems to me reliable.
I use it when I am looking for good site to request a link, together with Google PR.
The Google PR is agood tool too, but sometimes you can find several sites that are a "constellation": they all have a good PR thank only to their solar system. A good PR doesn't mean good traffic.
Sorry but what makes it accurate for the top 2,000 and not the top 5 or 10,000?
I can't speak for the top 5, but it's more accurate for the top 2,000 than for the top 10,000 because the "clickthrough pool" becomes much larger and therefore is less affected by actions of individual users.
Are there any actual demographics on users (audited and externally verified) or are they as I suspect primarily webmasters and people interested in some form of ranking system?
People use the Alexa toolbar for any number of reasons, including search. Alexa claims that 7,000,000 people downloaded the last version of the toolbar. It's unlikely that all of those people are Webmasters or statistics aficionados.
IMHO, the Alexa rankings are a long way from being perfect, but the 3-month averages have some value as ballpark indicators of a site's popularity in comparison to other sites within the same category--at least if both sites have enough traffic to smooth out variations introduced by one person's clicking. For one thing, there's no real incentive for the average Webmaster to invest time and money in manipulating the numbers--at least, not yet. It's possible that, in time, advertisers will take notice of Alexa and people will start manipulating their numbers the way the numbers at (for example) Media Metrix have been manipulated by major Web properties.
To make a long story short, my site jumped from 16 million to a few million in just a few weeks. I didn't realize it at the time, but my own visits (many) to my site with the Alexa toolbar loaded were scoring points for my site left and right. What a disappointment. I could've hit the refresh button a million times and been right up with the top sites. I dropped Alexa and their toolbar when I realized what a joke the ranking system was. With that kind of abuse potential, the numbers are completely worthless.
The chances are that people that download the bar will use our competitor's sites too, which will even out the rankings between competitors in the same sector. Therefore asking users to download the bar will not increase your ranking much unless your site has a very low ranking (less than 100,000).
The main growth in our ranking (now at around 10,000) was by combining sub-domains under one domain to match our competitor's site.
What makes you say that? I was thinking it was being used by fairly mainstream users. Seems to me, the tech pro's moved away from Alexa software a few years ago and are just now warming up to it again.
From their marketing pushes, I thought the average Alexa user was (computer/tech skill wise), below average. (eg: the old aol crowd aimed at the Alexa Internet Explorer combo)
I was thinking the same thing. It is in Amazon's interest to get those toolbars into the hands of mainstream users. Get them buying all that suggested stuff. Sure, the techs can come along for the ride but someone like Amazon wants those broad market impulse shoppers to use the toolbar.
The whole look and feel seems targeted to the mainstream and not really to the tech crowd - which is good.
