Brave Tech World

April 6, 2007

    People that read my blog know that I'm pretty interested in Alexa Ranking. It is a reasonable way to get a handle on the state of most popular companies' websites. Are they going up? Are they flat-lining? How they compare to similar companies?

    For those that don't know, Alexa is a sample-based system. They gather information from all the users that installed the Alexa Toolbar (a couple of millions). All data collection is anonymous. And, with any sample-based system, it is likely to have a fairly large margin of error.

    Some of the pros of Alexa, and the reason I like it, include:

• Easy access to a site's ranking on the web. Just go to www.alexa.com and click on Traffic Rankings.
• Historical graphical data of reach, page views and the Alexa Ranking, which is their magic combination of reach and page views.
• With the Alexa Toolbar you get a few freebies as well:
• Instant Alexa Ranking for any site that you're visiting.
• Domain Registration information on a single click (this way you don't need to do a WHOIS query every time you just want to know which company/person owns that domain).
• Alexa data is free!

    On the flip side, Alexa is a bit dangerous and should be used carefully. The problems include:

• Since only toolbar data is used to compute the Ranking, only sites visited by Toolbar users get credit on their system.
• The Toolbar, being a non-default browser extension, requires some level of technical expertise to install (at least more than simply using your browser), thus, skewing the data towards more technical people.
• Sites/Services that use multiple domains (sometimes the users own registered domain) are not correctly represented.
• Sites that use HTTPS extensively (e.g. Fidelity.com) are also not well represented.
• Since all collection is anonymous, Alexa cannot normalize the data like a research institute would do it for the web demographics. Compete.com tries to do that, but there are so few Compete Toolbar users that their data only works well for the top 1,000 websites of the web, while with Alexa up to 1,000,000 websites you've get pretty good coverage.
• Alexa data only works if the site *is* the service. For example, you cannot, an should not, compare YouTube.com with Ford.com. Users don't go to Ford.com to enjoy the experience at their site. They go there to gather information for an off-line task (buying a car), while YouTube.com is YouTube and there is nothing else.

     Alexa could improve a little (or a lot), but doing some modifications. What I would add is:

• Visit time: In a Web 2.0 word, page views is not the metric anymore, but how many minutes a user spent on a website per visit.
• Additional ISP traffic information: Alexa could partner with one or more ISPs to gather information about traffic from a different point of view. With the right privacy safeguards in place, that could be very valuable.
• Increase Toolbar adoption: Google went out of its way to make sure he could cut as many distribution deals for their toolbar as possible. The make a lot of money out of the toolbar. I'm pretty sure Alexa also makes a certain amount of money of their toolbar so they should be doing some distribution deals themselves.
• Add demographic data: I absolutely don't mind sharing my age, gender and income level. I do mind about entering an email address or a name. Contrary to what people think, most users will enter the correct information (I saw a study about zip codes used on Hotmail that proved that). That would not only make Alexa data more valuable to advertisers and company, but it would help improve the data itself by normalizing against the Internet population.

     Some of these features could be part of the "Premium Alexa". They already have my credit card number (Amazon.com), so signing up for $12/year for a Premium Alexa would be a no-brainer for me. Heck, I would pay more than that even.

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