Comments on: Alexa revamps ranking system

By: tdc- the real one

tdc- the real one — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:52:59 +0000

“juicing the numbers”

nobody does that, do they?

By: Don Day

Don Day — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:13:40 +0000

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).

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:10:40 +0000

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.

By: Bill G

Bill G — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:12:49 +0000

“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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:45:23 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:21:37 +0000

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.