Not Just Another Internet Business Success Journey

Who can Compete with Alexa rankings?

No matter where you go on the web, more and more sites are hanging out their Alexa traffic rank shingle for all to see. It looks something like the image below. What does is mean to the average site visitor? Should you get it for your site?

It shows the current, live ranking using the Alexa “method”. That is, where your site ranks out of 10,000,000 or so sites that are being tracked. Number 1 is pretty obviously out of the question for most of us smaller Internet-based business operators. Getting to the top 100 or 1000 would also be beyond our wildest dreams. However, getting below 100,000 is possible.

So what is the point of the ranking/graphic? Well, it helps improve a visitors perception of your site. A good ranking that is steadily getting better indicates genuine traffic growth. This can help to build trust among site visitors.

What about other traffic measurement sites?

Although there are five big traffic measurement sites (Alexa, Compete, Comscore, Hitwise and Netratings) only the first two, Alexa and Compete are useful for the average Internet business entrepreneur. This is for three reasons.

1. Free to access.
2. Traffic statistics for your site.
3. Relative traffic comparisons between two or more sites.

However, as with any system of estimating quantities, there are limitations to how accurate they can be, and ultimately, how much importance should be placed on their rankings.

What is similar between Alexa and Compete?

• Data is based on the browsing habits of users who have installed their toolbar.
• There are millions of users with the toolbar installed.
• Graphs and number are used to represent page rankings.
• Both can be manipulated in the short term to show an artificially high ranking for a site. Due to the longitudinal nature of the data, based on averages over time, if you wanted to maintain an artificially high ranking (say to get a better price over at SitePoint), then you would have to keep up the flow of artificial traffic for as long as you wanted to maintain the rank. Once the artificial traffic stopped the rank would settle back to “normal”.

What is different between Alexa and Compete?

+ Alexa tracks users anywhere in the world.
- Compete presently only publishes browsing data from US users (although Compete identifies this as a “feature”).
+ Alexa openly declares how the data may be skewed for a number of reasons in its “Important Disclaimers”.
- Compete makes no attempt to identify sources of statistical inaccuracy.
+ Alexa seems to have no obvious commercialised features in its rankings and toolbars.
- Compete has the “Deal Light” which indicates that the web page you are visiting has a special promotion or coupons to save you money. This is potentially open to abuse by vendor sites pumping up their visitor numbers and page views with regular low value coupons and promotions.

The lowdown after all that is that Alexa, as much as it is maligned in various posts and articles, provides a reasonably accurate measure of the traffic rank of a site.

Compete seems to have taken a different path with its Deal Light and seems to be targetting the needs of the e-commerce consumer.

They both meet the needs of certain groups of web users but Alexa takes the prize for being the best tool for the Internet-based business operator.

Brendan.

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