Marketing 
26 Comments The Alexa Rank – What’s the big deal?
Anyone worth their weight as a webmaster will, at some point, wonder, “how busy is my website?”. This sort of question can be answered when you look at any of your site statistics, for example your log files, or the more popular, Google Analytics. These tools are awesome for gauging what parts of your site are receiving great traffic and which are not. You can also see what pages are popular landing pages, and which ones your visitors leave from. Brilliant, however, it doesn’t tell you how popular your site actually is.
How do I compare to OTHER sites?
This is where Alexa comes into its element. There are other sites which do similar, and compare you against the other sites on the internet, but Alexa is the most popular. Alexa receives its information for creating website statistics from toolbars which people have installed on their browser. The toolbars monitor what sites they are on, and send the information back.
So now you know how Alexa gets its data, what does it do with it? Your website rank is based upon the preceeding three months of traffic. What this means is that the three months before the current date will impact your rank. My site for example has been around for a while, but its use as a blog is only new, just under two months. When I started out, by rank was something million. Soon after I started to get traffic, I saw my rank drop.
At the start, when you begin to get good traffic, your rank plummets quite rapidly. At least, mine did – it’s dropped around 16million or so in two months. Very soon, your rank will converge on a value where it becomes difficult to keep it dropping. This is the point where you are relative to other sites which have been captured by :Alexa:.
What are the drawbacks?
Now that you have a gauge of how popular your site is, you will want to know how accurate it is. It is important to note that your Alexa rank is more of a ball-park figure than actual fact. The method in which the data is obtained and manipulated is where the errors come into your rank.
The method of data capture requires that users have the Alexa toolbar installed on your browser. This is why you will see on many blogs, to reduce your Alexa rank, you need to install the toolbar. I don’t know the percentage of people who have the toolbar installed, so it is difficult to quantify the error. Regardless, the number of users will be sizeable enough to obtain useful statistics from.
The second method is the manipulation of the data. The rank is determined based upon three months of data. So your rank is an average. Say for instance you have had a bad month of traffic, and a month or two of good traffic, you will see your rank fluctuate.
Should I believe Alexa?
Alexa is something that I believe should be used as to help you gauge your site’s popularity. If you have a lower rank, you will be getting traffic. The more your rank reduces, the more traffic you’re getting. You can also use it as a measure to compare against your competitors.
I use Alexa to check how my rank is improving. Do you use Alexa at all? What is your take on its use?
While I don’t give too much credit to Alexa, because it is only based on people who have the toolbar installed, it is good to compare people within the same niche.
I use it as an incentive, not as a real guage of success (which is relationships/traffic/profit).
But that being said, I did just cross under 50,000 so that was huge for me!
I think the point you make Tom is a good one. Alexa Rank can be used as a fantastic milestone for setting goals.
Congrats on getting below the 50k!
Hey Mark,
I’ve been using Alexa to help monitor the growth of my blog but as you rightly say, it should really be used as a ball park. There are many instances where its ranking and reports are way off and thus does not truly reflect the popularity of your blog.
Alexa is just an ego booster in my mind and one should not rely totally on its data. It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish through your blog. Some advertisers do look at your alexa rank to help determine your site’s traffic. So its good to keep that in mind.
You’re doing good so far, so expect your rank to keep improving.
Hey Robyn,
I agree about Alexa rank being a bit of an ego boost. It’s great encouragement, and a relatively effective means to determine if your website is going the right direction.
I’ve heard some advertisers used Alexa. I will bear it in mind when this place becomes a little bigger.
Thank you for the encouragement, hope to see you around!
I don’t give much importance to the Alexa rank at he moment because of its drawbacks.
But the Alexa rank can come handy if want to sell direct advertisement space on our blog. Advertisers do look at the Alexa rank to gauge the traffic stats of he blog.
Hey Sourav,
Good to see you about. Robyn mentioned this above too about advertising. Have you an experience with advertising? I certainly agree with you both that the lower your rank the better if you are wanting to advertise
Hey, Mark. Fantastic post you’ve whipped up, here.
Alexa can be very misleading, mainly because it works off of a 3 month scale. So, you might get 7k visits today, but it doesn’t update for a week, because it’s a 3 month average.
I think, much like Robyn said, that Alexa is a moral booster. Nothing more, unless you’re in the top 10k.
Thanks Joe,
I think exactly this of Alexa. It’s a great ball park figure for popularity, and if you’re in the top few thousand, it’s great for morale
It is just a ballpark figure, and I certainly woudn’t fret over it daily, but it is interesting to see you Alexa score and of course a lot of fun when it goes up.
Thanks for the post,
Steve
Thanks Steve – I’m intrigued by my rank, and becoming interested in seeing how it will affect advertising – mentioned above by Sourav and Robyn
Great write up Mark, it’s good that you clarified this because a lot of bloggers don’t realise it’s only based on those with the toolbar installed.
I personally do not have it (I have enough toolbars thankyou very much) but you mentioned that the rank will come down if I do?!?
I have watched my rank steadily climb(drop?) and is now around 110k.
I too use it as a goal mark more than anything, it certainly doesnt account for money or traffic directly so i really don’t care. (secretly it is good for the ego to see it coming down consistently each day (drops by around 2k a day average)
I actually installed the toolbar on my netbook which I use at least once a day. I’ll see if it makes much difference. As you say, the rank is a nice little booster though.
You’ll have your site below 100k in no time too mate!
Actually, Alexa changed its algorithms almost 18 months ago, as I wrote about it then, to de-emphasize the toolbar because everyone had been writing that their ranking system was invalid because of it. If you read their site on how they do it, they even tell you how they do it, though they don’t tell you the sources. That was around the same time they started ranking more websites, because sites that used to be out of the top 10 million never had rankings before, and how I see sites ranked as badly as 19 million, which is a shame. lol
That’s true. I checked out their site again. And the data is still made up from unique Alexa users hitting the websites. I would speculate that there are different ways they can do it.
Maybe in the long term it will become more reliable.
Thank you for dropping by though and contributing to the post, I really appreciate it
Hey, I just finally cracked the top 100,000 with my blog, so I’m loving Alexa lately.
The thing I did notice as my Alexa rank inproved was on the side of advertising, I started getting more offers for Ads as well as emails from sponsors with free merchandise etc that they would like reviewed, so a benefit there
I have heard that having an Alexa badge on your site also feeds data to Alexa on your sites performance, whether this is true or not I don’t know, maybe someone can clarify this..
Hey Karen,
I like the sound of that – being approached because you’re getting traffic. It’s certainly something that can be a positive, but then I guess you have to carefully handle whatever you review.
While I have an Alexa toolbar on my blog, I see it more as a distraction. Perhaps one will gain more benefit if it focuses on the strategies on gaining more traffic rather than worrying about the fluctuating data of Alexa.
Hey Walter,
I know what you mean. I have it on my netbook, and it’s a bit of an eye-sore. The only information, which is useful to me is the Alexa rank. If I wanted to know it about a particular site, it takes all of 10 seconds to find it manually.
I agree 100% – focus should be developing traffic. Alexa rank isn’t really going to help you – maybe a little bit of an ego builder when you’re in 5 figures, rather than 6 or 7.
It’s not a real metric of anything. It’s a guess based on a super small set of people who have the toolbar installed.
Don’t believe me? Check your rank today. Install the toolbar and click on 10 of your pages a day for 3 weeks.
Watch your score skyrocket. Then check your google or server stats. No change right?
It’s all BS.
Wanna get in the top 25K? Get 5 friends to help you game the system.
Hey Chris,
Thanks for dropping by, it’s always great to see new faces around.
I’ve heard that tip you make a number of times. I’m actually going to try it to gauge how influential the toolbar maybe is.
Alexa is definitely not the most efficient way to track your traffic, but it does have its merits. I don’t like that it requires the use of their toolbar to take accurate statistics, but until someone comes up with something better (or Google Analytics releases its own Alexa competitor) it’s the best option I’ve found so far.
Despite knowing it’s imperfect, I’m also aware that (unfortunately) it’s something people – like advertisers and potential site buyers – look at as a benchmark of success (just like Technorati Authority and lots of other little things that may or may not REALLY = success). Since these are measures of success, these are some of the things I’m tracking as my blog grows. They’re not as end-all, be-all as overall traffic, but should give you enough information to tell whether your site is growing or shrinking.
I didn’t know that about Technorati Authority. I guess I’ll be using there more often
hm – this Alexa thing has me in a maze – I don’t have the tool bar installed and yet the ranking seems to drop at a constant rate….as you say – whatever this means
Frieke Karlovits
A low rank is always desirable, regardless of it’s (in)accuracies
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