I know a couple webmasters myself and they've always been obsessed with their "Alexa Ranking", and to some degree has used it to measure their success on the world wide web. Is this accurate? The short answer – No! The long answer, is possibly but based on how you use it. I'm going to break down what Alexa measures, how is it relevant for you and how you should use it.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Alexa here's a little background. Alexa is a tool available online to measure the ranking of websites based on traffic. So for Google who's one of the tops in traffic they're ranked number 1, and Yahoo who has a bit less is ranked number 2 and so on. Over the years web developers has been obsessed with their ranking as a measurement of how well their website is doing and to be honest this is not a good way of doing so, to a certain degree.
Inaccurate Measurements
First thing's first, lets understand measurement of traffic. If say right now I want to find out your website's traffic I can't, obviously because you own the website and you don't want to share it with me. Now if I was to place a tracker code in your site then I can see the statistics without your consent, but I need your approval and admin access to do so. With that in mind, think about how Alexa is able to measure your website statistics, they can't without your consent! So that's the "trick', they actually gather statistics from their Alexa toolbar. I'm not sure if you're using one right now, but people have installed a tool made by Alexa to quickly get statistics of websites they visit but what they aren't aware of is that Alexa is doing the same thing. They're tracking user visits to websites and accumulating a data of their own. This is why the Alexa ranking is not accurate and not a precise measurement of your success.
Shouldn't It Still Work?
Ok, so somebody was to say, its not accurate but if so many people use it, shouldn't it still work? Well here's my take on it. As far as I know the Alexa toolbar is only available for Firefox (correct me if I'm wrong), and FireFox users only account for 46.6% (1) of browsers online. That means that a majority of users are still neglected in the statistics. I don't have the stats but I have a feeling there are demographic segments that does not install the Alexa toolbar so depending on which target market/niche your website is catered to you may be higher or lower on the charts.
The Proof
Based on the theory I have above I've decided to test it out. The company I work for is a B2B company but their target market is senior level IT people which a majority is in the 39+ category. Our website visitors are mainly on IE6.7. Now the sites have on average a few hundreds of unique visits on a daily basis, but their rankings are between 1 million to 2 million. I
On the contrary I have a personal site which has 20+ unique visitors a day on average, but my ranking for that site is in the 400 000 category. It goes to show, its all based on the users that visits your site; therefore, skewed and inaccurate.
So It Doesn't Work – Why Use It?
Even though it doesn't give you an accurate ranking in the world wide web you can use it in a different way. Based on the first part of this article you aren't able to see other people/company's website statistics so by using Alexa ranking to compare again competitors in the same segment is a method to measure yourself against your competitors, but even then its not very accurate.
The true method to measure your success is to mark a goal and try to achieve it. If its 100 unique visits a day or $100 dollars in revenue a day, just set it and aim for it. When you have achieved it, you are successful.
1. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
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