Alexa

[izwar]

How inaccurately are the traffic ratings on Alexa i hear they are extremely inaccurate. and also how do you read the number lets say it says 50,000 what does that relate to?

[Chris]

It is completely worthless for predicting actual traffic. You can only use it for traffic trends or comparisons.

Even then it is skewed because Alexa isn't so popular as to have even distribution among all demographics. Internet related sites, especially website marketing sites, tend to have a very skewed ranking because of the increased probability that their members use it.

[MaxS]

Yea, it's worthless. I only use it for traffic trends/comparisons.

[KLB]

Alexa is an insidious beast. Its stats are worthless for anything other than general trends or comparing two very similar sites, yet advertisers tend not to realize this and often rely on it to make advertising decisions.

[Kyle]

Lets say you're trying to decide which "ebaumsworld" style site to advertise on... So you're only looking at those humor portals where most of their content is the same (or free online game sites).

Alexa is great for comparing which is the biggest or most popular in a given topic. Obviously exclusing all webmaster sites.

I think this is extremely useful, as public tracking statistics are never shown.

People are too hard on Alexa. Most people shouldn't be comparing a free online game site to a site that sells computer hard drives when deciding where to advertise. This would of course, be a horrible use of the Alexa data.

[polspoel]

Top 10,000 is a good indicator.

[izwar]

is it true it only records, hits that are made with their toolbar?

[Kyle]

Yes.

[KLB]

is it true it only records, hits that are made with their toolbar?

Yes, this is the big problem with it. Corporate and academic IT departments frequently ban it from their computers and some anti-spyware programs flag it as spyware. As a result there are certain demographics (e.g. corporate professionals) that are significantly under represented.

[Chris]

...and others, Internet marketers (the only people who really care about it) are over represented (to a huge degree).

[fredarn]

Alexa is a fun tool, but not worth so much for business...

[izwar]

ive have been trying to install the alexa toolbar just for fun and i have been getting all sorts of errors. Once i download it which takes a few times because it says the server times out, then once i download it i double click and says i do not have the rights to open the file? then if i do it again nothing happens at all. i managed to get it in a zip and it showed unable to open. weird?????

[john190]

Alexa stats are inaccurate, but I still find them useful for some things like trends and things.