Alexa is a tool that ranks over 30 million websites based on data from users who have installed the Alexa toolbar and other undisclosed sources. It provides website traffic analytics and rankings to help users and businesses understand a site's popularity and potential for marketing. While Alexa rankings can provide general competitive intelligence, its accuracy and audience are limited, making it best as an initial overview rather than a definitive source for a site's traffic stats.
2. What is Alexa?
Alexa is a tool founded by Brewster Kahle and Bruce
Gilliat 16 years back, for helping users to measure a
website popularity on the Internet.
It ranks 30 million websites.
It helps in taking business decisions.
It helps us to find out how much popular a website is
in internet.
The lower is the rank of the website, the better it
ranks in Alexa.
Alexa is a toolbar which people can install on their
browsers to help them to lookup which sites are the
most popular ones on the Internet.
Mostly, the top sites on the Internet are also the top
3. How Alexa works…
The information which are collected through users who had installed
the Alexa tool bar and from other unrevealed sources, help Alexa in
determining the ranking positions of websites.
An user could find the rank of a website and in turn help Alexa refine
its website ranking database through its toolbar.
Alexa could be fetching data through Amazon’s subsidiaries -
Bookpages.co.uk, Joyo.com, dpreview.com, Audible.com,
Fabric.com, Zappos.com, livingsocial.com, Accept.com,
exchange.com, Lovefilm.com, Endless.com, Brillianceaudio.com.
10. Why Alexa is an awesome tool!
Alexa ranking is the right metrics for webmaster and
advertisers to find out the marketing potential of
websites. In other words, the better the site ranks in
Alexa, the chances that they get more clients willing to
buy an advertising space in the website is higher.
Alexa is the only service that provides the most accurate
rankings for a website.
Alexa plays a vital role in performing competitive
intelligence analysis which helps a webmaster to
benchmark his/her site with another site and analyze
patterns for strategizing the future course of actions that
are needs to be taken.
It concerns over webmaster’s privacy by withholding site
stats to the public if he/she feels to do so.
11. Why Alexa is not so awesome!
Inaccuracy of site ranking.
Alexa audience is too small.
Alexa tool bar is considered as a
trackware/malware/adware by various antiviruses.
only site owners knowingly download Alexa so they
can monitor or influence their own Alexa stats.
Alexa might be used to study and analyze pattern of
users, which in turn could be used for commercial
purposes by Amazon and for its subsidiaries for
increasing the ecommerce performances and increase
profits.
Alexa’s poor sources for deriving ranking made itself
clear by ranking youtube.com higher than Google.com
in 2009.
Small fluctuation in traffic source nature could lead to
drastic changes in ranking.
12. Conclusion
We may rely on Alexa for an approximate or
nearby stats and to acquire an image of the
scenario, rather than to find a clear depiction of a
website’s traffic stats as we see through Google
Analytics.
It may help for a beginning market study and
initial market and competitor research which by
any means cannot be 100% accurate.