Alexa thinks I’m important. Wahoo. But what does this mean? Absolutely nothing. Let’s pretend we were playing baseball (or were subject to the California penal code) and we were giving Alexa 3 strikes. These results are shocking ridiculous:
According to the stats, for the last week, I’ve actually been up to 103,212 and even at one point last week I think I saw 90,300. I’ll tell you this: I’ve doubled my traffic since last week, so my stats should be better, not worse. Strike 1.
According to some comparisons with some other internet marketing blogs I read, I surpassed Marcus Hochstadt and John Cow at the end of April with reach (I used reach because rank was unreadable and cow has since surpassed me last week) and caught up with the famous/infamous James Brausch about 10 days ago. James ranks in the top 10 for "internet business" (well, his .com site does), Marcus ran a great big promotion right about when I supposedly surpassed his ranking, and John Cow is presently running a big promotion. Strike 2.
This is obviously my first internet marketing blog. While I run a few other sites, this is my newest one (until next week), and none of them are internet marketing/business related. They get 10-20 times the traffic this blog gets, yet every single one of them is ranked lower than this 2-month-young blog. Strike 3.
Flash over to Compete.com, where I’m not even on their radar yet. YET:
Wow. Much better. It’s like someone removed the wool from our eyes. It’s ridiculous how Alexa relies so heavily upon their toolbar to get statistics. They just changed their algorithm from "bad" to "bad". Good change.
If you advertise at all, which you should, there is really only one way to figure out if that site is good for you: test. Quantcast and Alexa give you some good demographic data. If that matches your target demographic, throw up an ad and track it. After 2 months, if you aren’t in a seasonal business and you can justify an ROI, continue, by all means.
And publishers, please stop touting your Alexa rank. It just makes the new advertisers skiddish, excited, and scared all at the same time.
- Congratulations Marcus
- John Cow vs. Gary Conn: My Take
- Blog Advertising for Advertising Sake
- Quite Possibly the Best Thing to Happen to You…
- Traffic, Product Launches, and Buying a New House
Wednesday, 21 May 2008 Filed under: Marketing by Bryan
Alexa has always been a bad guide and I hate it when people use it to demonstrate how great there site is doing. I have a site that gets 30k visits a month (which I know isnt the best) and it barely ranks in Alexa, but are visitors of a heavy metal band fan site likely to have an alexa toolbar?? then I have a site that gets 20-30 visits a day and ranks 280k in alexa. My personal blog, getburied.com (which ive been a bit slack at updating recently) had a huge traffic boost this week due to an old post ranking at number one in google, yet my alexa rank didnt budge. My own stats give me a better guide of how my site is doing anyway.
Adrians last blog post..5 held for hacking government pages
Yeah, they’re still heavy on their foolbar. Alexa does nothing but feed the ego of the site owner. From an advertiser’s point of view, I use compete.com for traffic, Quancast for demographics, and my own tracking for results. That really hasn’t failed me yet.