Alexa bias and the need for alternatives
March 7, 2007 | Comments (2) | Filed under: Ranking
If you’re just starting out in the world of online publishing, you may not yet even know what Alexa is. Alexa.com is Amazon Inc.’s resource for measuring web site popularity and ranking amongst other sites and it currently enjoys a position of status when it comes to the web development community. Alexa’s system provides anyone who’s interested with a breakdown of site traffic as well as an overall ranking amongst all other sites. It also generates a detailed forecast that lets you see whether the site is on an upward or downward trend.
Sounds great doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, it sounds great but actually isn’t. The problem with Alexa is fairly substantial and has the potential to greatly impact anyone who is new to online business. The bottom line is, Alexa is biased. In order for a site to receive traffic that is counted with Alexa, it must be visited by someone using a web browser equipped with the “Alexa Toolbar.” This is great if your community happens to be users of Internet Explorer because it’s currently the only web browser capable of installing the toolbar. Even if your users are primarily visiting with IE, there is a good chance many of them have never even heard of Alexa, let alone taken the time to seek out and install the toolbar. What this means is that even if your site is getting a ton of daily traffic, to Alexa you might be nothing but a flake of snow in the arctic.
It’s because of the detail Alexa provides, and the fact that it became sort of a defacto standard with its timing to market, that it currently plays a fairly large part in the online marketplace. Many online advertising firms place a lot of weight on Alexa rankings to determine, not only a sites acceptance into their program, but also to set a base rate for advertising pricing.
As a result, anyone who understands Alexa’s role is basically forced to install the toolbar and run Internet explorer just to ensure their site gets ranked. This biases the results even more. Obviously, web developers and publisher’s websites are going to rank disproportionately higher then other sites simply due to the fact that they are intentionally trying to build Alexa rank while other sites are not.
Even the Alexa team itself acknowledges these issues. From their FAQ:
…the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa’s data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.
Recently, Google engineers Matt Cutts and Peter Norvig estimated a webmaster skew based on the traffic of each other’s respective blogs. In summary:
The data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of Internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.
The samples must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO industry, so it overrepresents those people.
In the end, it is obvious that while Alexa is a stop-gap measure, it is in serious need of an overhaul or some aggressive competition. Until it receives such attention, I think many advertisers and developers should take its results with a grain of salt.
The ultimate solution would be for sites like Yahoo, Google, or MSN to release more comprehensive details on site access statistics. Each of these giants could easily report this information, especially Google who already tracks it via its page rank tools. In addition to these sites, there are other emerging sites with potential to better gauge traffic. Sites like StumbleUpon, which allow users to randomly browse sites and leave reviews, are probably already tracking statistics through their own toolbars. Other direct competition, such as Compete is already putting the pieces in place to directly, well, compete for Alexa’s market share.
The need is there, we just need someone to step up and take some ground away from Alexa. In the meantime, lets hope publishers and advertisers alike start placing less emphasis on Alexa rankings and start giving the little guys a better chance of coming in off the bench.
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2 people have left comments
I found problems with Alexa rankings in comparing my traffic court site with my traffic lawyer site, and discuss it on my blog at: http://albany-lawyer.blogspot.com/2007/04/alexa-traffic-rankings-bias.html
Saw another article that mentioned compete.com too. I tried it out and found that was better at least for comparing between my traffic court site and my lawyer site.