Alexa ranks

[susan]

Hi
I viewed my sites rank through Alexa Web search and found my sites have decreased in the traffic rank.

But i have good visitors and ROIs.

Can you tell me upto which extent we can believe this Alexa ranks ?

Thanks
Susan

[vicyankees]

What sort of decrease are you seeing?

[Torq]

Alexa rankings can be manipulated some what. Try compete.com as well. You will notice some different stats then Alexa

[Marketing Guy]

I noticed an update in Alexa rank data today as well (been playing around with it over the past few weeks). IMO the data isn't very realistic and as Torq says it can be manipulated pretty easily.

MG

[Torq]

That being said, short of spending thousands of dollars on Hitwise or Nielsen ratings, the average marketer can gleen some info that could be helpful. What are your thoughts on Google analytics? Ive heard good and bad. Urchin does provide some good reporting material.

[Marketing Guy]

Yeh some nice data can be taken from most analytics packages - really depends what you want to do with it all really, which varies from type to type of site.

For e-commerce sites, I'd say information you can gather from customers can be a lot more valuable in the long term, particularly in terms of deciding where to focus / push your marketing efforts.

Technorati isn't bad for blogs as well - new inbound links can be found almost instantly and their link count leads onto link counts of other blogs as well (I've found a few decent blogs to read from there).

Referal data can be good to monitor SEO efforts though - it's also a great way to find untapped markets - key phrases that aren't being targeted but are providing decent traffic.

MG

[Torq]

Insightful observation. Have you had any success with PPC outside of Google and Yahoo. I run several campaigns on a highly filtered Miva feed. Ive had some good success but always worry about click fraud.

[Marketing Guy]

TBH I haven't develed much into PPC - organic SEO has been my main gig for a long time, and while I appreciate the value in other channels of marketing there's always been other people to handle the PPC side. :) The main focus of a lot of the freelance work I have done has been to reduce PPC spend and allow organic referals take over (which IMO is more cost effective in the long term).

I'm just a cheap-ass! ;) SEO appeals to me because it brings traffic (and therefore business) for free and as most of my own sites are information based and not direct sales, this is the most appropriate way for me to market them.

I do know a lot of associates and clients have had great success with lower tier and vertical PPC engines though - again (as with analytics), it's really down to your business type to determine how appropriate it is.

MG

[susan]

vicyankees, traffic rank for the site, reach of the site and page views - all these have decreased for the past 3 mons.

Can i consider alexa ranks as correct or it is just a fake number and we need not consider it?

[richardb]

Us it as a guestimate, like other tools. None are perfect. It's easy to get a site to go from nowwhere in Alexa to 300,000 in weeks... Make of that what you will.

[japoax]

Alexa Rank is not that accurate, I noticed that the more users having the alexa toolbar installed that visits your site, the better your alexa rank seems to get. I just tried it with an experimental site about 8 months ago and that was what we noticed.

[webconnoisseur]

Alexa data is terribly inaccurate. I suggest you read my recent post:

Please Stop Quoting Alexa Data (http://www.webconnoisseur.com/blog/uncategorized/please-stop-quoting-alexa-data/)

In there, I show how large the margin of error is by comparing two very different sites. There's also a list of links to other people who have criticized Alexa data.

-Dustin