As the Yakezie Challenge continues, I can’t help but wonder if Alexa is the new Nielsen rating? For those not familiar with either Nielsen ratings have become the leader in viewership on televisions. Nielsen relies in some part on a set meter, which monitors which attaches to the television and monitors what is being watched on that set. I’m not sure about the advancements of Nielsen ratings but I do know this is how it started and is still in use today. I’m sure they’ve added other ways to measure what is being watched. What they are essentially doing is using a small sample set of the American population to estimate what the rest of America is doing.
Enter Alexa rankings. From my understanding, Alexa rankings measures website traffic by the amount of people that visit a particular website that have the Alexa toolbar on their browser. Thus, they are relying on a small sample set to estimate the behaviors of many people on the internet.
There are many ways to question the validity of these measurements but I’ll put myself out there. I can attest that my Alexa ranking is not a great indication of the traffic I am receiving to this website. I know for a fact of people with higher Alexa rankings than me that are getting a lot more traffic. In fact, I should probably thank my fellow Yakezie members for my ranking. Part of the requirement for participation is to install the Alexa toolbar and visit other members sites. Due to this one could guess that a large percentage of my visitors have the Alexa toolbar installed which is causing Alexa to grossly inflate my website’s ranking.
What are you thoughts on this?
Am I inadvertently taking advantage of this?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
There is no perfect measurement without everyone agreeing on one tool. With statistics, it is highly likely to be accurate the larger the sample size. If you only have a few visitors to your site and they all have the Alexa toolbar installed, you are likely ranked much higher. Interesting topic. Keep up the great work! I am not a fellow Yakezie member!
.-= BibleDebt´s last blog ..Officially Joining the Yakezie Challenge =-.
BibleDebt:
I’m thinking I’m ranked higher than I should be, but I’m not complaining.
Good analogy. And like the Nielsen ratings, those with the Alexa toolbar “influence” the ratings on sites which can have other effects….just as the Nielsen ratings can effect rather a show stays on the air or not.
Difference is…anybody can install the Alexa toolbar (so go get it…hint, hint….many of the sites you visit will appreciate it
I often wondered what would happen if IE and / or FF rolled out with Alexa ranking installed by default! There would be such a shift in rankings, but the ranking may be closer to real numbers
.-= Lakita (PFJourney)´s last blog ..Will You Take Advantage of the Homebuyer’s Tax Credit? =-.
Lakita:
You make a great point. Why wouldn’t one of the browser have it built it? i guess Alexa doesn’t pay enough money for that. It would definitely increase the accuracy of the statistics. I’d be willing to bet that if Alexa got the measurement built into browsers (even if it wasn’t the full toolbar) that they would benefit from it in the increased traffic and exposure as their ranking system became the most accurate and dominant statistic. Maybe they will learn from the Yakezie?
I’m learning more about Alexa from the Yakezie Challenge, while it’s not the perfect system, it’s easy to keep track of your rankings. I just don’t know if many of my readers have the toolbar installed, so I have no idea about the results. I admit, though, I like to check to see if Couple Money’s ranking is going up.
.-= Elle´s last blog ..Introducing Couple Money’s Weekly Round-Up =-.
Elle:
The problem is that the more “average” your readers are the more inaccurate the ratings could be. Most people don’t install the Alexa toolbar. The only ones that know to do it are the tech savvy readers. If it became more widely used you would probably see an increase in my ratings as the system realized (what I’m guessing) that I have a higher percentage of people visiting with the Alexa toolbar than I should.
I look at the Alexa rankings from time to time for my website. It is amazing how much the rankings changed when I started to add the type of content that you would find in a blog. The articles on my website get read often and bring a fair amount of daily traffic. I am averaging about 270 visits a day which is very good for a Real Estate site.
Bill:
That sounds like some great traffic, especially considering that your focused more regionally within Massachusetts. Brings me to my next question, what are you doing with those visitors? Any leads? Any conversions?
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