Use Alexa: with care!
Serveral people (like Brett Tabke from Webmasterworld) have been preaching caution when using Alexa Traffic analysis. The average opinion is: if you are not among the 10K sites of the web, your data is not valid. Today Matt Cutts posted another indication, that the data is only little useful.
However have I been looking at these traffic developments for some time, at least to get a slight idea, where we stand. The point is, that in this special case (sorry, Shannon, I need to use your company as comparison :-), that payloadz is for sure still bigger, simply because they are twice as old as tradebit. The only thing that this chart really tells you, is that you reach about the same amount of tech savvy users, probably webmasters and sysadmins, who play around with the toolbar of alexa anyhow. It gives you NO idea, how successful anyone REALLY is. I know of serveral sites in our industry, who do at least 5 times the revenue we do, but are on incredible low figures on alexa… so, if you want to read anything out of it: do it carefully…
The real cool thing would be Google offering the same from their outgoing clicks… THAT would be a killer app!
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May 17th, 2006 at 11:54 am
Ralf,
I watch the Alexa trends as well myself. I find it to be inconsistent at best. The thing that tipped me off to what may be inaccuracy is when I compared the Alexa ranking to my web site statistics. They didn’t always match up. Usually, when Alexa shows a big drop, the web logs show a steady amount of traffic.
Of course, Alexa only tracks users with their toolbar as we both know. I personally don’t know anyone that uses the thing, but I imagine it is the average, non-tehnical web user. That being said, our sites actually ctaer to these types of user, or maybe ones a little higher up on the food chain of tech.
I also have issue with the % of subdomains where people visit. I don’t think that is accurate at all, at least not in visits- definitely not in page views. I punched in tradebit a few months ago into Alexa and was amazed at the tremendous growth you had. Great job of marketing!
May 17th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Totally agreed! And I am still not sure, if the toolbar counts every object of a loaded page, because e.g. pictures could be hosted with us, but users are on a payloadz customer page
that would count a hit for us both 