* Alexa's data collection is limited but useful
How’s your Web site doing? How many visitors have you had? How many visitors have your competitors and partners had? How does your site rank?
There are a number of ways to get good answers to these questions but one that has intrigued me is a free service called Alexaholic.
Alexaholic is based on data from Alexa, a “navigation” engine owned by Amazon (a combination of search and site information).
To understand Alexaholic you need to appreciate what and how Alexa does what it does. At the heart of Alexa’s data gathering of Web site usage statistics is the Alexa toolbar, a browser add-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) that provides search facilities, site ratings, antiphishing support, anti-popup support, and related site links. The toolbar also reports back to Alexa allowing it an estimation of online user behavior.
[Digression: Why does Alexa only support IE? Apparently it doesn’t have the will or resources to develop for Firefox. This is pretty sad as it implies that Amazon is less than supportive of the company and its huge user base.]
Note that I used the word “estimation” rather than, say, “measurement.” This is because unlike audience measurement firms such as Neilsen//Netratings, Jupiter Research, and comScore the users of the search bar are self-selected and therefore have less statistical significance [Disclosure: I created the Netratings concept and was a founder of the company]. Alexa also notes that, “Our users are disproportionately likely to visit sites that are featured on alexa.com such as amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be overcounted.” It goes on to say, “The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages (https:). Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data” (see notes at the end of this page).
Despite the limitations, the data Alexa collects is still useful and indicative of stats for most major sites (for example, Network World). These stats provide an estimate of a site’s “daily reach” (“the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site”) as well as number of page views, and rank (the geometric mean of the reach and number of page views averaged over time for a site compared to all sites).
The purpose of Alexaholic is to make Alexa data “more usable by putting them into a lightweight, interactive interface with easily-bookmarked pages.”
Alexaholic also offers an interactive “chartlet”, which can be embedded in Web pages and blog entires (for an example, click here).
If you need to get a feel for the performance of a Web site and want to present the data on a Web or blog page and don’t want to spend any money doing so, then you definitely need to check out Alexa and Alexaholic.
