About Alexa - some analysis

[arcadetown]

Alexa gets a lot of attention. Previous to 05 it's behavior was odd but mostly predictable while in mid 05 it became quite bizarre. So I did some 05 analysis.

2005 ArcadeTown.com Alexa vs our real internal stats (http://www.arcadetown.com/i/2005_at_traffic.gif)
Real traffic was up and Alexa followed nicely until mid year then Alexa went bizarre and tracking downwards even while traffic did it's typical after summer increase. Meanwhile sales increased far faster than traffic, sometimes increasing even while traffic down, due to better visitors and better game releases. So Alexa has some to do but totally <> traffic or sales.

2005 HeavyGames.com Alexa vs our real internal stats (http://www.arcadetown.com/i/2005_hg_traffic.gif)
Real traffic was up huge and again Alexa followed nicely until mid year then it's just bounced around from there even though over a huge 2x increase in traffic since then.

What's happening?? Other webmasters have reported similar and looking at other large game sites and sliding ranks... My guess is Asian users are becoming even a larger % of Alexa sampling, tons of new users still coming to the web, and new genre sites like myspace.com exploded on the scene pushing previous top genres (i.e games) down a few pegs.

(edit) More conclusions: Are other sites gaining "real" traffic that much faster than us, wow?! Alexa gyrates crazily on daily basis but if look at a few weeks it's more clear.

[Andy]

I dunno Brian,

I suppose that something just broken in their system.

Look at ours: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.wildsnake.com

And even after we accept their 200K rank for us - we always had something better than 100K in last more than a whole year. So do you suppose they have found 100000 more sites better than our in last two months or what?

REM: Sure thing following by our own statistics our own traffic just stayed on the stable level. We just don't make anything good or bad for it. We just leave it as is. :)

So, go figure...

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Brian, just so I understand correctly, the green and red lines in your graph are the actual numbers from your own site data?

It would be interesting if at least one other large-ish game site (doesn't have to be a portal) provided the same data. Then we could try to normalize Alexa versus 'actuals', and come up with some time series 'deflators' to apply to Alexa's info. Then you could get pretty close to a solid page views/day measure.

[JPGinLA]

Alexa is totally off with regard to traffic on all of our sites.

I can't offer graphs like you, but can confirm your conclusion re accuracy.

:-(

[TimS]

Alexa's system for creating their statistics is ridiculous... I'm kindof surprised they're still around / getting attention as a website.... ah well.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Of all the sites out there that do free, public traffic analysis for any website you want to look up, Alexa is by far the worst...

(and only..)

[arcadetown]

Then you could get pretty close to a solid page views/day measure.
You'll never get any solid comparison between sites as there's far too many variables in the Alexa equation. Biggest variable is traffic source as webmasters/techies and Asians (particuarly Koreans) tend to have a much higher Alexa install rate. Not scientific but my gut conclusion put together from various sources.

< 100k : not at all reliable, 0 - 10k visitors per day.
50k - 100k : 5k - 50k visitors per day.
10k - 50k : 10k - 200k visitors per day.
1k - 10k : 50k - 500k visitors per day.
1k - 100 : 200k - 5mil visitors per day.
> 100 : 2mil - 20mil+ visitors per day.

Alexa's system for creating their statistics is ridiculous...
Of all the sites out there that do free, public traffic analysis for any website you want to look up, Alexa is by far the worst...
Alexa is not bad if you understand and use it properly. It simply has a smallish sample size which is why it gyrates so much. Plus Alexa is what EVERYONE talks about, that and perhaps Neilson Net Ratings which is expensive (and flat out wrong on our sites).

[BinaryMoon]

Of all the sites out there that do free, public traffic analysis for any website you want to look up, Alexa is by far the worst...

Alexa is the only site I'm aware of. Can you point out any equivalent sites? I was under the impression Alexa was kind of the standard for this sort of thing. I like the compare feature but if it's as out of synch as it seems it's pretty worthless

[Phil Steinmeyer]

I was (trying to be) a bit ironic - hence my final comment.

I should have written it the first way I thought of, similar to Winston Churchill's statement about Democracy (paraphrasing - "Democracy is the worst possible form of government, except all the others...")

No, I don't know of anything better than Alexa, though I too, would be interested if there were such a thing.

[BinaryMoon]

Ah - I didn't notice the, incredibly subtle, after text. Sorry.

[Vorax]

Alexa is pretty much rubbish from what I can tell.

Let's be honest, if Alexa worked 99.997% of the top 100K sites would be porn with Google, MSN and Yahoo accounting for the other .003%

PS: Here's another reason why Alexa is rubbish - People that use the internet know not to install toolbars. So the people that really use the net are exactly the ones they can't track. Very flawed indeed.

[Didier]

Hi,

Recently Alexa changed it's ranking calculations.
This is because there are more and more sites entering the WWW.

I read a press release from Alexa on this one but i can't remember where :confused:
I'll post a link when i found it.

Didier

[chanon]

I just wonder if/when will google start to put out website traffic data like Alexa from the Google toolbar.

[Cartman]

I would also be interested in additional links like Alexa. However in the mean time, I use Google Analytics( http://www.google.com/analytics/.

It requires you to put a tag in your pages for monitoring, but the monitoring is pretty impressive. You can also monitor marketing campaigns through it.

[BinaryMoon]

The problem with Analytics is it doesn't compare you to other sites. If all you want is server stats then there are loads of pieces of software out there that will track visitors. Analytics is good but it's incredibly complex.