Sazbean

You may have run across customers or competitors who claim to know your website traffic or how your site is doing compared to their own. How do they get this information? Typically it is from a service, such as Alexa or Compete (we’ll cover Compete next time).

Alexa has a traffic comparison service (along with a search and some other web information services). Some people have installed Alexa’s toolbar in their web browsers and Alexa uses information about their browsing habits to estimate traffic on websites. For each website, they have an overall traffic ranking, reach, and page views per user (all estimated). Each of these stats also has a 1 week average, 3 month average and 3 month percentage change. If your site has a high enough rank, you’ll be able to view these stats in graph form and compare them to other websites as well.

What is Alexa good for? Part of competitive analysis is knowing where your website stands compared to your competitors. Alexa can give you a general idea of where your website traffic is compared to your competitors as well as other industry-leading websites. Find an industry website that you consider to be well-designed with good content and use it as a standard to measure your own website improvements. Use Alexa to track how well your improvements and promotions are working compared to your industry-standard site and your competitors.

More importantly, in my opinion, is knowing about Alexa’s service and how it works in case your competitors are advertising their traffic compared to yours or your customers seem to know a lot about your traffic rankings. In both cases, be aware that Alexa does not factually report your traffic statistics, they are simply an estimation based on a small percentage of people. They may be useful for comparison purposes, but only if you take into account a margin of error for how many people in your industry use their service. The only way anyone can know your actual traffic statistics is if you share access to whatever tracking program you are using (or if they somehow have access to your web server log files).

Next we’ll take a look at Compete.

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