Alexa Toolbar - Using it Wisely in Assessing Traffic Ranking

Updated April 2004

In recent months, Alexa has added to the amount of information it collects and it can be quite a useful tool for your online business (and yes, if you download it...it is going to collect information about where you go on the net). We thought now might be a good time to investigate the information provided by Alexa.

Alexa Toolbar Background

If you're not familiar with Alexa, it is a site that attempts to rank all the websites on the world wide web according to traffic. Information is based on those who have the Alexa toolbar downloaded on their browser (You can download the Alexa Toolbar  by clicking here), so of course, it cannot be held as truly accurate information.

Still, Alexa provides good data on website traffic & trends. With so many websites vying for your advertising dollars, you need to have a way to check a websites general traffic rating and whether their traffic is on the rise or going into decline. It's also a great place to check out how your competition is doing as far as traffic is concerned.

Alexa Toolbar Basics

If you have the Alexa toolbar, you can automatically see rankings as you surf. You can also find this information by going to the Alexa website. Just enter the domain name into the search box.

The lower the number, the higher the traffic ranking. You'll see Yahoo, Google & eBay in the Top 20.

If you're in the top 100,000 ~ Congratulations! ~ You are doing very well. Unfortunately, according to Alexa, if you're above that number, the numbers cannot be considered accurate. 

Alexa Toolbar Traffic Ranking Details

This is a good place to scrutinize a website that you're planning to advertise on or if you're looking for some joint venture partners. It gives you a general traffic ranking over 6 months. As an example, you can look at  InternetBasedMoms.com traffic ranking by clicking here.

You will see a daily traffic trend graph that shows the traffic over 6 months. If the site is not in the top 100,000 in that period, the graph is blank.

Then you'll see "Reach per million users". This show the number of Alexa users per million users that visited the site.

You can also see the number of "page views" from Alexa users. This is a telling statistic. A site with a higher number of page views will tend to have content that is of interest to its visitors that prompts the visitors to stay a while. Of course, a small website will likely garner fewer page views, so keep that in mind.

Other Information You Can Gather from the Alexa Toolbar

"People Who Visit XXXXX.com, Also Visit..."
I don't pay much attention to these as these are often sites suggested by Alexa users. However, it looks like they've recently made some changes and many of the sites listed are those in same category in the the Open Directory Project and it also looks like the toolbar is now actually reporting the visitorship of the Alexa toolbar users. They've taken away the option to suggest a site, which seemed to be a way for people to try to piggy-back on the good rankings of other sites by suggesting their own.

"Reviews"
You can write reviews about websites here and you can ask other to reviews about you.

"Site Owner Info"
This information is made available to Alexa users if you submit it.

"Sites Link to"
Simply shows links to your website. Although, Alexa's search is powered by Google, this linking information does not appear to be provided by Google. I'm not sure how they find this information.

Again, Alexa can never provide 100% accuracy, but it is a valuable tool for you to use in checking out your competition & evaluating your website promotion options.

 

More Search Engine Information: Highly Recommended! 

Check > John Reese's Traffic Secrets 2.0 course is a must have for anyone serious about driving traffic to their website.  Learn more about this fantastic resource by clicking here.