Analyzing Alexa Stats
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As the Short Family Web Site has been increasing in popularity I’ve started to pay some attention to the statistics about our traffic collected by Alexa.
Alexa is an Amazon.com company that was founded in 1996. According to their web site, “Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users. Alexa Related Links and Traffic Rankings are the embodiment of this vision, growing and getting better as more people join the Alexa community of smart Web surfers.”
The traffic details and site stats information presented by Alexa is data collected from users of the Alexa Toolbar. The toolbar itself does quite a bit but the data is collect is very interesting to us webmaster types. If you have a web site I would recommend that you check out your Alexa stats just so that you can have a better idea of where your site ranks compared to other web sites on the World Wide Web.
As for the Alexa stats, they can be somewhat confusing. Hopefully this will help folks break down the Alexa stats:
Traffic Rank is basically where your web site ranks among all others in terms of popularity.
Reach represents the percentage of Internet users who visit a web site. “So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com.”
Page Views in general is a very important statistic in regards to measuring the quality of a web site. If a user visits your home page that’s a page view. The more page views the better because more of your pages are being opened.
Alexa Stats do not replace a good web log analysis and statistics program such as Webalizer or WebTrends due to the fact that these programs can provide you with in-depth analysis on the performance of your web site. Alexa provides you analysis of your web site using data collected by Alexa Toolbar users only.
However it’s nice to see how an external source sees your web site and to be able to compare it against other web sites.
You can see your Alexa stats by going to the following page and typing your URL into the search box:
