Using Alexa to Compare Traffic Across Sites
Dustin on 06 7, 2006
Do you ever wonder how well your website and/or blog is doing in comparison to your competitors?
While there is not a great site on the web for getting accurate traffic statistics on competitors, Amazon does provides some stats based on people who are using their Alexa Toolbar. Rather than try to give total site hits (which they can’t do), Amazon gives us relative stats (as in “X number of people out of a million” visited this site). Here are some observations from some searches I did tonight:
- Redfin pulled way ahead of Rain City Guide with their latest marketing push into San Francisco. (Although they are seeing a substantial drop-off since then similar to what happened after they were featured in the NYT last February).
- Zillow briefly jumped ahead of Realtor.com after their launch, but has since seen a consistent drop in their traffic. (The pattern is even more pronounced when you look at “page views” as oppose to “reach”.) It will be interesting to see what they do to turn that around.
- I wanted to check up on Ardell, but Alexa hasn’t figured out the subdomains on realtownblogs yet. Nonetheless, Rain City Guide is consistently reaching a substantially larger audience than all of the Real Town Blogs combined.
- Curbed is still swamping Rain City Guide, although we appear to be catching up with Grow-a-brain! Also of note is that the RealtyBlogging crew is catching up with Rain City Guide.
- Of course, none of us can boast the phenomenal growth of myspace and wikipedia… Wow!
All good stuff, but remember to take these statistics with a grain of salt. As Matt Cutts of Google discussed a while back, the type of people visiting a site can definitely skew these results greatly and considering Rain City Guide is in Amazon’s backyard, we’re more likely than most to have traffic from people with the Alexa toolbar installed.
About the Author: Dustin Luther
- Author's website: http://www.raincityguide.com/
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22 Responses to “Using Alexa to Compare Traffic Across Sites”
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The only problem with the Alexa toolbar…once you download it…..it comes with a TON of spyware. I downloaded it this morning to try it out, then ran my spyware checker, and I had about 79 of them suckers and most of them were high threats! I deleted them all and the toolbar went buh bye with them! Cool concept, but not so good to come with all the spyware attached to it!
I’m shocked to hear that! I wouldn’t think Amazon (who owns Alexa) would want the bad press that goes along with the spyware. Personally, I’ve never used the toolbar, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t benefit from others who do have it installed!
In looking over their download page, they have a pretty strong pledge not to profile based on your surfing habits and/or send any spyware via their toolbar. Are you sure you downloaded the toolbar here and that the spyware was not already installed on your machine?
Good point, Becky – RCG readers should not be advised to download the Alexa toolbar.
Alexa’s stats are sort of accurate, but are skewed towards people who are not tech-savvy. Some web developers think of it as a way of figuring out how many “stupid” people come to your site, because only people who let spyware sit on their computer have the Alexa bar (web developers have a skewed concept of intelligence).
zillow–this sideshow attraction will run its course (hopefully) & become lumped along with the age & weight guessers on the boardwalk. Let it be what it is –another guess as to what a property is worth–but done by a machine we can somehow trust over a human being. Funny thing is we want a human being to check the zillow machine for accuracy—does no one see the irony here?
personally i dont see the “curbed appeal”– generally uninteresting building photos, annoying ads, & links to its own posts?
can someone explain it to me?
Yep, I downloaded it from the link you gave us. And when asked to delete the spyware that it found, it got rid of all the spyware and the Alexa toolbar as well.
Well, I sort of take my comment back: Alexa used to be filled with spyware. Now it apparently just sends information back to Amazon about every site you visit (some sites report that it might include credit card numbers, passwords, and encrypted pages). Some spyware checkers target Alexa because they fiddle with your registery and the internal workings of internet explorer, some don’t. Bottom line: it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be.
Hi Dustin, it’s Amy at Zillow. I agree with you that outside measurement services like Alexa should be taken with a grain of salt – in fact, various services often conflict (comScore, for example, shows Zillow traffic growing month-over-month, which we think is a little more accurate than Alexa: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=854 )
However, we do like to use Alexa directionally to compare the popularity of various sites as you’ve done. I’ve also found Google Trends a new useful tool for this as well.
Amy, thanks for the link…
I’m sure you guys have traffic data of much higher quality than anything that Alexa or Comscore could give. Does Comscore’s data match your internal numbers better?
Is there anyway to do a traffic search on Comscore or do you need to buy a subscription?
comScore’s general trends have been closer to our internal monitoring but actual numbers are still pretty different from what we measure.
comScore is subscription-based but they do put out press releases on trends and also provide them to the media. Here’s something Inman wrote on comScore numbers last month for the top-10 real estate sites (requires Inman subscription):
http://www.inman.com/inmannews.aspx?ID=51694
I agree with Galens first post…. does anyone tech savy download anything these days if it is at all suspect?
I mean someone who is interested in SEO might… but the average tech savy person could care less when alexa makes a transition from spyware to sorta spyware.
I would think the numbers would have to be skewed.
Also of note is that the RealtyBlogging crew is catching up with Rain City Guide. -Gosh, I don’t have a speech prepared or anything. I don’t know how close we are to catching Rain City Guide but we certainly appreciate the confidence boost!
Chris,
No need to be so modest. You guys are doing a great job consistently writing interesting stuff! Keep up the great work!
Just a quick FYI…
Because Alexa scores are based on a sampling (those users have downloaded the Alexa toolbar), it is inaccurate for all sites of less than about 1 million visitors per month. And the less visitors you have, the more inaccurate Alexa is.
Oh, and one million visitors monthly gets you ranked about 2-3,000 on Alexa.
Best,
Bert
[...] Web site statistics update July 5, 2006 A quick follow up to our previous discussion about using Alexa to measure how many people visit your site (or visit your competitors): Alexa is reporting “geek” sites doubled in popularity overnight. Jason Striegel hypothesizes that this is likely the result of digg users downloading the Alexa toolbar en masse on the day that a top story linked to Alexa. [...]
Alexa is a good tool in a smart head. Personally I think article or essay buying (kind of HQessays.com or professays.com) is more powerfull weapon
[...] Note the obvious: Microsoft only has demographic information on people who give it this information. This means that the data is just as suspect as the Alexa data. [...]
[...] Courtesy of Statsaholic: (with the caveat that Alexa’s data is suspect) [...]
Hi, I tried to download alexa toolbar and I am using bitdefender antivirus package to protect my computer. When I tried to download the bar, my bit defender poped up stating there has been a trojan hidden in a .gif image. Even my antivirus did not allow to atleast look at the page. I can conclude that alexa bar is harmful. But I really have a doubt why are they doing this? It got that much fame but why?
If you dont believe then just see in my blog. I am going to provide with a screen shot about this. Its not present now but within few days I am going to write a post about this.
I believe you nithin, but not sure there is much I can do about it… This post, along with the toolbar, is pretty dated, so there is quite likely better tools available to accomplish the task you’re looking to do (and I’m not even sure what that task is!)
My computer simply would not allow the Alexa toolbar to download. The entire Explorer interface shut down after a threat warning. The same happened on Firefox. What is the benefit intended to be for having the toolbar?