Is Alexa really showing our blogs true traffic?
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After writing my post on Is PageRank coming?And who cares? it started me thinking whether any of the Ranking systems truly represent our blogs worth. So I started looking at my Alexa and wondered why they show the three month average and not the one week average.
How is the Alexa Traffic Ranking Based?
“Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.”
Why people like Alexa?
Again like PageRank it comes down to pure marketability of our website. A website with a low Alexa (say 10,000) can sell there advertising spot for a far higher price than a site with a relative high Alexa rating (like 1,000,000).
Other reasons people like Alexa is for the reason that Alexa will not rate the sites quality in any way but solely its unique views and pageviews which can be manipulated with a little work.
How accurate is Alexa for judging a sites Reputation?
We all know when we search our Alexa; they will give us a table like mine below.
You can see that my three month average is 493,490 and my one week average is 251,125 which represents a 50% difference in traffic.
When readers or advertisers see the widget on my site they will see the figure 493,490, this clearly is not a true representation of my current blog traffic which is around 50% better than my three month average.
After searching a few sites, i checked a friends site and seen his Alexa figures where far worse than mine, with a one week average of 1,312,995 and a three month average of 4,196,531 thats a whooping 2.8 million difference.
As a blogger would be possible to sell my advertising space for a lot more by using my one week average?
Clearly the answer is “Yes” and probably a large difference in revenue.
So would the one week average be a better figure to display?
With the one week average you will have a better representation of your current traffic, which has it’s good points as our blogs are very dynamic but again with a little work people would be able to adjust their Alexa. My feelings are that one month average could be the magic number as it would balance the erratic one week average but will offset three month average.
Could you kindly leave your comments on the two questions below:
- Would you prefer to see the one week or three month average on your widget? or maybe any other number?
- Whats the your one week and three month average? and the difference?
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4 Comments on this post
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WarriorBlog said:
I would say yes and no. As for me, I just love looking at improving stats
October 4th, 2007 at 12:26 am -
ms danielle said:
alexa is very skewed, the number 1 stat i look at is RSS numbers, and of course i watch my traffic numbers. but as long as your RSS is on the incline, you’re good to go
October 5th, 2007 at 12:47 am -
admin said:
ms danielle, thats one good way to analysis your visits by RSS feeds
October 5th, 2007 at 1:02 am -
James said:
I agree, Alexa does seem to have a few flaws. But then again no system will be perfect, people will always work out how to manipulate it!
October 5th, 2007 at 10:52 am
