Alexa Rank: Interpreting the numbers
What exactly is an Alexa ranking and what do these numbers mean to you and your business blog?
The answer sort of depends on who you ask. Of course if you ask Alexa, you get this generic overview:
“Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.”
In laymen’s terms, it’s a traffic estimate. When you ask SEO gurus, most of them will tell you that these numbers are nearly worthless and are no indication of the real traffic your site receives or doesn’t receive. But some of these same gurus will tell you that they also believe that Alexa ranking might just have something to do with some of the search engine spider algorithms.
More important to companies, Alexa rank means something to your advertisers. It’s become one of the industry standards for judging the value of advertising costs and can be a factor when corporations are looking at your site as a possible ad partner.
Which IS important. Because for many company blogs, the plan is to build up traffic and sell ad spots on the blog they maintain.
So let’s take a look at some Alexa numbers and try to interpret what they mean.
In the above image you’ll find the Alexa traffic ranking for this blog, taken today. In it we find that the traffic ranking for this blog is currently 227,052 which is supposed to be a ranking of all the websites on the internet. So our traffic makes us the 227,052th most visited site on the web according to Alexa. (The three month average is considered to be the most useful number when reviewing Alexa stats)
However, the one week average is also important for many potential advertisers, because it can show trends for a website or blog they are considering and point out possible movers and shakers. Up and coming sites that have traffic increases indicating considerable popularity. Now if they are watching weekly trends, they may watch them for several weeks in order to determine if the traffic is just a flash in the pan, or if the site is really becoming something they need to take notice of.
Another important factor to potential advertisers reviewing your blogs alexa stats is where the actual traffic is coming from. So looking at the traffic rankings by country becomes a large point. If your traffic ranking is in the 100 thousands or so, but all of your traffic is coming from Korea, it’s not going to be appealing to most U.S. based companies targeting English speaking audiences. That doesn’t mean that your traffic is not valuable, because it probably is to companies targeting that market. Just make sure that you offer your advertising opportunity with the correct traffic statistics. If your traffic is primarily foreign, say so. It can still attract large advertisers wishing to hit that specific market.
Ultimately your traffic ranking with Alexa is simply a guideline and may not reflect actual traffic statistics at all. You most likely have server statistics you can review that contain the actual traffic stats within your hosting account features. AWstats, Webalizer, and many other traffic tracking software programs come free with paid website hosting for the major companies out there.
If you don’t have any server based software, you can always use a third party counter to review your traffic statistics. There are tons of them out there, you just need to do a quick Google search.
Bottom line is this. You may not care much about Alexa traffic statistics, but many potential advertisers do. Some of them may be watching your site’s Alexa ranking without you even knowing it. So it’s good that you know what your Alexa numbers are, where they were, and where they are going.
Tags: Alexa Ranking, Blog Advertising, Blog SEO
October 10th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Alexa ranking is very important….. That is one of the important thing when ranking a site….
March 14th, 2009 at 4:46 am
This might be a little off subject, but have you looked at seoclientprospectingrobot dot com? Just wondering if you have any reviews of it, I’m thinking of buying a copy, and wanted to see if anyone had bought a copy yet.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:41 am
The style of writing is quite familiar to me. Did you write guest posts for other blogs?
April 19th, 2009 at 7:17 am
The fact that Alexa could be manipulated with softwares is a bad thing. Apart from that, they have pretty much a large sample size to make it quite reliable results.