Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Alexa traffic rank: what it is and why you should care (or not)

Alexa is an Amazon owned company that is famous for its public traffic ranking service via its alexa.com website. Website promotion guides often make a big deal about how to improve your Alexa ranking because a top position is often associated with high profits. As a new webmaster, you must understand a few very important points about Alexa’s service. This article will explain what the data collected by Alexa mean and then describe why you should care or not.

There are three numbers that Alexa reports, reach, page views and overall rank. Reach refers to the percentage of all web users that visited your site. Alexa reports this number as “reach per million users.” For example if Alexa reports a reach of one, it means that on average out of one million web surfers one visits your site. Page views simply measures the average number of pages a surfer examines when at your website. Those sites with a lot of content and targeted visitors tend to generate a larger number of page views. The overall Alexa rank is a combination of the reach and page views numbers such that the larger both of them are the lower the site’s rank will be; for Alexa, a smaller rank indicates a more important website. Alexa reports these numbers for each day, one week and three month averages and the overall change over a three month period. So, how does Alexa gather these data?