Thread: Alexa.com - Website Stats

Alexa.com is where to go if you want a rough idea of how well a site is doing and how busy it is or isn't, so lets have a look at what it has to offer.

Alexa gathers its data from people who download its toolbar, as they make no claims of increasing surfing speed or anything silly like that not many people use it, I reckon between 1 in 2,000 to 3,000 use it, also many anti virus softwares don't like it as it is a data miner so see it as a threat, so to get a fair view of a site it does need a lot of visitors, sites with less than say 100 visitors perday are likely to get an alexa user a couple of times per month, so not really a very representive view.

First its got reviews, we haven't got any so go there now and do one, around 350 to 500 words should suffice, good or bad up to you

Alexa traffic rank, hmmm, a bit pony really, supposedly gives you world rankings of how busy a site is, ie we are the 87,443 busiest site in the world, if I downloaded and used the toolbar we would move up maybe 10,000 to 20,000 spots, so pretty easy to fool but would show quite an increase in page views per user.

Sites linking in on alexa is ok for a quick over view, if you want to go more indepth on inlinks to a site then this thread is for you here (Checking Links to your website - Inlinks).

Page views per user is pretty important and an easy way to tell if a forum is trying to cook the books per say, if you have a website and its getting 1 page view per person then either your website has the information they were looking for, or, more than often it is completely shite and the person is pissed off wasting his time viewing it and is now back on google looking for the info they wanted which wasn't on your site.

With forums obviously they have a hardcore of members and guests who may view 10 pages or 50 pages every time they visit, it maybe everyday of the week or maybe once per week, but on average, (not including the last few weeks) 50% of people will surf in on google searching for something particular, the odds are they will read one page, ie the content they were looking for and then go back to the porn site or whatever it was they were doing before, that is shown in the bounce rate, ie they came and looked only at that single page and then left the site.

Last year or the year before about 6 of us used the alexa toolbar, all heavy users of teakdoor, it brought the page views per person up to something like 20 pages, to get that in real life you would have to aim your site at people who have erection problems and it would have to be the best porn site in the world, so it probably doesn't happen to too many websites

This graph shows what people searched for to get to teakdoor, it does give a fairly reasonable idea of search terms used but obviously google web tools and other sites do it better.

The reach is what percentage of the world is viewing your site, everyday more people get the internet, but everyday more websites are made with similar content to what you may have, if your reach is going down then your doing something wrong or the competition is doing something better than you, worth keeping an eye on.

At the bottom you can add up to 4 websites to show how they are doing against you and you can change the trailing period from between 7 days to 6 months, 7 days is good if your in the top 100,000 busiest sites in the world as it will give you each days figures.

Traffic rank and where traffic comes from is quite interesting, I mean 12.6% of our users come from USA, now that looks pretty good, but when you look at our traffic rank for USA it is 188,701 which is pretty awful, although compete.com(think thats the name) ranks us in the USA as around 40,000, which is correct? I have no idea but either one of them is totally skewered or they are both completely wrong. Just goes to prove you can make something look good or bad depending on what stats you want to use

Now this next picture shows upstream and downstream sites, upstream is where they came from to get to teakdoor and downstream is where they went, google is a bit low percentage wise due to them dropping loads of indexed stuff from forums in general, bit of a bitch to keep dynamic stuff in google but for some reason a few weeks ago they dumped loads of stuff from forums.

The strange bit obviously is the amount of traffic from tv as I doubt we have any links there, but don't forget alexa can only gather information from people that use their toolbar, so for arguements sake if george had asked his mods to use the toolbar and they also like to pop in here that would skew the figures quite dramatically, which is what I think is happening with that figure.