Thoughts on Alexa rankings
January 22nd, 2008 by Dan Roberts Whenever generating an SEO report for any client or a site appraisal I always look at the sites Alexa ranking, both at the time and over time. Over time I use it as a measure of performance.
But, really is there any value in this ranking? After all Alexa rankings are determined by traffic measures for Internet users that have installed the Alexa toolbar in their browser (either Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Firefox), so isn’t the data completely skewed.
Mat Weir, Xebidy lead developer, believes the data to be completely useless; his argument being that installing the toolbar is more likely in some users than others. For example, he says that You Tube users are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, whereas Digg.com users are not, giving Digg a much lower traffic volume than it really has.
I had a brief look at some of our mates sites. Comparing Wayward Bus (ranking of 2,322,699), Adventure Tours (834,129) and Oz Experience (974,589) they all have rankings comparative to each other of about where I thought they would be based on our web analytics. Perhaps there is a value in comparing apples with apples. When I compared Base Backpackers (14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand) with The Park (a hostel in National Park, New Zealand - where you say, exactly!) I find that their rankings are 3,292,826 and 2,522,225 respectively - this is very contrary to my web analytics.
Is there any value in the Alexa ranking as a site comparison indicator. I think there is if comparing two sites in exactly the same market with similar Internet users. I think Mat is right though that comparing sites across markets is pointless.
Is there any value in the Alexa rankings as a site performance indicator? For the time being I am going to say yes, but I am going to investigate further. As a trend indicator it provides another measurement, but, at the end of the day, theoretically the ranking is derived as a measure against all Internet traffic (well, a sample of it anyway) and if, say, The Parks ranking goes worse, but our web stats show our traffic has increased and revenue has increased then surely we are happy; or are we, perhaps it is a fair argument to say that we are under performing relative to the Internet.
Tags: SEO
March 5th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
so alexa seems to be a biased sample but you would use it as a kind of focus group ?
March 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Alexa seems to be useful for comparing apples with apples. Say for the above example where we have two bus companies operating pretty much in the same market we can hypothesis that the users would have similar demographics and therefore the same amount to have the tool bar installed.
I don’t think you can gauge much by simply looking at a sites Alexa ranking in complete isolation or even tracking it over time in isolation. I also don’t think you can really even compare “like” sites e.g. Digg and Del.icio.us because by their nature their demographics are quite different and you could probably say that Digg users are far less likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed or vice versa.
I have since removed the Alexa ranking as a measure of any significance in our reports to clients on SEO performance.