Alexa revamps ranking system
Don Day April 16th, 2008
The much-maligned, not always accurate Alexa ranking system has been revamped according to TechCrunch - mixing in more data source than just the Alexa toolbar. Alexa isn’t saying what exactly that secret formula is - but some of the searched I run on the site seem to be slightly more in-line with reality. The bottom line is that there still isn’t an accurate way to compare sites and get a good read on traffic - not even the professional services like those offered by Nielsen.
6 Comments Add your own
1. Anonymous | April 16th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
How would you know if Alexa is accurate or not? It doesn’t chart absolute traffic, it tracks relative traffic. Don’t turn to it to find out how many people visited your site, use it to compare your site to others.
2. Anonymous | April 16th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Ugh, they got rid of the best feature: long-term charts. Now you can’t see, for example, how this year’s Superbowl site performed compared to the year before. And you certainly can’t see how this year’s candidate sites compare to the sites 4 years ago. You can’t see long-term trends at all. Just 6 months.
3. Bill G | April 16th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
“there still isn’t an accurate way to compare sites and get a good read on traffic”
Not entirely true.
For sites that are “quantified” [i.e. they've inserted the Quantcast pixel into their pages], Quantcast.com is nearly perfectly accurate. Their data closely mirrors our Google Analytics and our own server logs.
The problem is that relatively very few sites are currently “quantified”, so while the data is good, comparisons may be hard to come by.
4. Ed | April 17th, 2008 at 7:10 am
If only there were a single company that we were forced to accept as correct, like with broadcast metrics, there wouldn’t be this problem.
5. Don Day | April 17th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Bill G - you proved my point. There still isn’t a good way. Very few sites have a Quantcast pixel inserted… making it useless.
Anonymous #1 - I know the site isn’t accurate because I can compare it with what I know to be true. Say we have a big spike… and the pageviews on Alexa don’t show it — or even a slump. It also can be manipulated pretty easily (we had a shopping site here in town juicing the numbers and going out telling advertisers that they beat all the big news sites in town… and advertisers believed it).
6. tdc- the real one | April 17th, 2008 at 8:52 am
“juicing the numbers”
nobody does that, do they?
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