How Misleading are Alexa's Rankings?

Alexa's traffic stats are all the rage especially among the social network crowd or perhaps I should say only with the social crowd. As a niche marketer I have known for a long time that Alexa stats are not worth looking at as they can only tell you how many Alexa toolbar users dropped in - not how many actual visitors you received. The vast majority of people online do not use the Alexa toolbar and hence don't get counted.

I have one niche site that gets over a thousand unique visits a day and it ranks over 2 million on Alexa. It is not a Internet Marketing related site or a tech site. IM'ers and techies tend to be the biggest users of the toolbar and social networkng sites. If you don't draw them to your site you will not have a very good Alexa ranking in spite of having a lot of search engine traffic.

I thought I would post my stats for this blog to show you just how misleading your Alexa ranking is.

This blog normally gets between 350 to 450 unique visits a day. Until recently most of my traffic came from the search engines - 95% from Google. Some of my traffic has come from sites linking to me and these visitors tend to be Alexa toolbar users. This has given me an Alexa ranking of about 180,000 +/- for the past several months.

I have always been curious as to just how few alexa users you needed to get a high ranking. I am only guessing as it is hard to know for sure but I would say that I would not have had more than 50 alexa user visits a day and probably a lot less to get me a ranking of 180,000.

I drive traffic to this site by adding a link to it from a number of my other non-related sites. You would be surprised how a "Would you like to know how to make money online" link can generate clicks even on a shoe or fishing site. Lots of people are a bit curious to say the least. In general these links send this blog roughly 100 visitors a day but it can vary wildly.

Last week I removed all of these links and my traffic for this blog dropped off fast.

The image below (click to enlarge) is my traffic from two weeks ago. You will notice the drop off on Sunday - the day I disabled my links from my other sites.



The next image is my traffic stats for this past week.



The most obvious thing you will notice is that my overall traffic dropped. Not as much as it should have though and there are a number of reasons. This past week all my articles were zoomed on Blogging Zoom which generated some visits. A friend of mine (Monika at The Writers Manifesto) gave me a nod on an article she wrote on a high traffic site which brought in quite a bit of traffic I wouldn't normally see and I had a few stumblers drop in that I usually don't get. Most of the new traffic probably had the Alexa toolbar judging from the following results.

If anything you would expect my Alexa rankings to drop right - I did get less traffic than usual. So what happened...



My Alexa reach has been increasing steadily for the past month or so because I have become involved in the social network scene and have started gaining visitors who use the toolbar.

The image below is Feedburners stats for this blog for the past week - it isn't the most accurate compiler either but it will serve to make my point.



You will notice that according to Feedburner I had 947 visitors from the search engines and 456 visitors from other sites. A rough average of 2 search visitors for every 1 visitor sent by another site. For my purposes let's assume that all the domain visitors have the toolbar and the search traffic doesn't. This isn't accurate but it won't be far off the mark either.

If I divide the results by 7 days I can roughly say that I have been averaging 65 Alexa toolbar users a day for the past week.

Here is the question - what rank do you think you would have on Alexa if you only had 65 visitors (with Alexa Toolbar installed) a day to your site.

Look below for the answer...



A one week average rank of 71,000 from a measly 65 visitors a day.

Granted I could be off the mark plus or minus a few visitors but even if I said I got a hundred toolbar visitors a day that's not really a lot is it to get such a relatively high ranking. How many visitors do you think you need to rank 40,000 on Alexa? Well twice last week I hit that mark and total visitors to the site on the two days were as follows 330 visits and 307 visits. If we take out the 2/3 that I averaged in search traffic this tells us that you could average 40,000 on Alexa with as few as 100 - 120 visitors a day if they all used the Alexa Toolbar.

Just thought this was interesting as I am sure a lot of you are wondering just how much traffic you need to get a good Alexa rank. It also shows you how misleading Alexa really is - remember I have a site with over 1000 visits a day and it ranks over 2 million.

Oh, one last thing. I verified something again this week. When your search traffic drops off your adsense revenues do decline. My adsense earnings dropped by a whopping 50% this week without the extra traffic my other sites provide. The increased social traffic is great but it doesn't pay the bills. Needless to say I have put the links back.

Griz