Alexa has been the standard way of measuring a website’s traffic for a few years now. People in the domain name market use it as one of the indicators of the value of a domain name. Alexa isn’t perfect – the traffic ranking is calculated from within the set of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browsers. Since that set of people tends to be those who are interested in traffic stats (ie Internet marketers), the results are somewhat skewed. However, as long as you understand that no traffic stats can be flawless, Alexa’s a good reference.
Sticking your hand up for the search engines…
Quantcast has recently appeared to challenge Alexa. They offer a different angle. Their free service (while in beta) allows you to check the ranking of your site against 20 million or so others. You have to insert a snippet of code on any site you want to track.
Putting snippets of code on your websites for any tracking program is like sticking your hand up for the search engines – “I’m interested in my traffic; I’m a marketer; this is a commercial site”. So you need to balance that against your desire to have even more statistics.
Take a look at the Quantcast results for Alexa.co,. Google.com and other high-traffic sites – very sexy. You can click on the arrows near the top of the screen to skip to the next or previous site in the rankings. Look at the age demographics for myspace.com compared to facebook.com.
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