Even to someone like me who enjoys browsing over site statistics and testing the accuracy of the resulting metrics, understanding an Alexa traffic rank is not an easy task.
Except for the fact that the Alexa traffic ranking system is based on information generated from Alexa toolbar users and that “A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Reach and Page Views” plus some kind of “data normalization” which also are not explained, there is not much information about the Alexa ranking system.
In its FAQ, Alexa also stated: “Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the past three months of global traffic according to our diverse data sources, and are updated weekly.”
Given this minimum traffic tracking period, I wonder how a blog I set up at WordPress.com about two weeks ago was able to attract a traffic ranking. Is it because that blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and Alexa is biased towards WordPress.com-hosted sites? That’s probably not the case. There must be other sites hosted by WordPress.com which have been online for many months now, yet they are still showing an Alexa “No Data” status. (By the way, the small Alexa image on this page shows “No Data” for Alexa which we could only surmise that Alexa did not like to make its traffic ranking public.)
Metrics like unique visits, page views and the like in gauging site traffic performances are still more reliable indicators. They are also easy to understand. I can also explain the figures to my clients.
But I cannot say the same thing with Alexa’s traffic ranking. After all, according to Alexa, if a site traffic ranking is beyond 100,000, the figures are statistically meaningless. For a site traffic rank to be statistically meaningful and reliable, a site should be close to the top rank.
Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. (However, on the flip side of that, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.) // Source: Alexa Help page, “Sites ranked beyond 100,000 – how reliable are the stats?”
With many websites that are not even close to the top 1,000 or even 50,000 (let alone #1), I wonder why advertising placement agencies even bother to look at a website’s Alexa traffic rank!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thats a good point. So if I am understanding you correctly, your blog that you set up on wp was a blog hosted by wp which had a completely different alexa rank than the main url of wp.com? That is odd. My alexa rank is 454,210 throughout my entire site. I am running 3 separate scripts on one url and it doesn’t matter which one your on the alexa rank is the same. I also find it interesting that Alexa doesn’t want their own alexa ranking to be known and that google sits at number 1. Ironic.
Hi Dave
Thanks for dropping by. I think WP.com-hosted blogs are assigned their own Alexa ranking separate from the traffic ranking of WordPress.com. For some anyway. That’s one of the points that I raised – which is the inconsistency (assuming we understand what Alexa is doing) in the application of Alexa’s ranking system.
With regard to Alexa not showing its own ranking, that I really find not only interesting but amusing. Why a company would like to hide its own ranking is something I cannot understand. Alexa has assigned traffic ranks to practically all websites, and yet it does not want to reveal its own ranking?