How important is Alexa ranking?

October 10, 2007

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How Important is Alexa Ranking? By Adriana Iordan (c) 2007 Alexa Ranking - A Web Site Monetization Strategy? All businesses that employ online marketing, strive to improve their conversion rate. Now, there are different ways of attracting targeted traffic. Some try to achieve a good ranking in the SERPs, while others are satisfied with heavier traffic. Either way, everybody has the goal of achieving financial success.

But, while scoring high with Google may seem to certain business people the only way to make themselves known and thus reach their goal, there are others that think that a good position in the Alexa ranking system might benefit them just as well.

Googlelady does not have a good alexa ranking comparing to other blogs and websites but if you check each article title in Googlelady is well ranked in Google for each keyword. I am sure most of you came from Google searching for a certain keyword.

What is Alexa Ranking?

This is a ranking system set by alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/) (a subsidiary of amazon.com ) that basically audits and makes public the frequency of visits to various Web sites. The algorithm by which Alexa traffic ranking is calculated, is simple. It is based on the amount of traffic recorded over a period of three months from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed.

This traffic is based on such parameters as reach and page views. The reach refers to the number of Alexa users who visit a particular site in one day. Page view, as the name indicates, is the number of times a particular page (URL) is viewed by Alexa users. Alexa.com makes it clear though that, if a particular user visits the same URL multiple times on the same day, all those visits will be counted as one.

The first step of the ranking process is calculating the reach and number of page views for all the sites on the Web on a daily basis. Alexa ranking is obtained by performing the geometric mean of reach and page views, averaged over a predefined period of time (three months).

How Alexa Ranking Works

It’s quite easy to get started. All you have to do is visit the alexa.com site and download (and install) the Alexa toolbar. This toolbar offers a search function, but it mainly displays the rank (at a global level) of the visited site, as well as the sites that have been visited by Web surfers that are linked in some way to the site being visited.

The Alexa toolbar not only displays information, but it also sends data to the central server. Thus, each time you visit a Web page via a Web browser (be it Internet Explorer or Firefox) that has the toolbar installed, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting. Such data is gathered from all the Web users who have the Alexa toolbar.

With Alexa, the smaller the numerical ranking, the better. Most people say that if you manage to make it in the top 100,000, it is a sign that your site enjoys quite heavy traffic.

Is Alexa Ranking Worth Anything?

Benefits

• Alexa Traffic can be used as a competitive intelligence tool (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/08/competitive-
  intelligence-analysis-why-what-how-to-choose.html), but you should take into consideration the fact that the audience
  sample size is fairly small. Just enter your competitor’s site in the “Compare Sites” section and measure the results
  of your web marketing efforts in comparison with your competitors’.

• As opposed to Google’s PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.

• It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the real marketing potential of your Web site. The better your Alexa rank, the higher they may be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.

• Personal pages or blogs are also ranked in the same way as ordinary Web sites. They will even get a distinctive mark (*)

Disadvantages

• Not everybody (including me) has the Alexa toolbar installed, so there might be millions of Web sites that, even if they have a lot of traffic, will not be ranked (or not high enough) by Alexa. It is rather relative.

• Alexa traffic is inaccurate and can be greatly influenced (or “gamed”, as some prefer to call it).

• Subdomains are not ranked separately, and neither are subpages within a domain. The overall traffic is calculated for the top-level domain only.

Conclusion

As we have seen, there are pros and cons to Alexa ranking. The bottom line is that most people consider it valuable only for direct advertising. Given the fact that Alexa ranking for a site is calculated on the basis of how many visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited that particular site, the results can be inaccurate.

Nevertheless, it may prove useful for sites with very good traffic that attract highly targeted leads, since Alexa focuses more on the traffic that Web sites receive rather than on links to it. As a Web site monetization strategy, we can safely say that Alexa ranking might be the right solution.

Adriana Iordan is a Web Marketing Specialist at Avangate B.V.
(http://www.avangate.com). She has in depth knowledge of internet
marketing services and website analysis applied to the software
industry and e-commerce development. Avangate is an eCommerce
platform for electronic software distribution incorporating an
easy to use and secure online payment system plus additional
marketing and sales tools.

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