Alexa's most well-known service is its free traffic information graph generator, which can give you a variety of traffic information about any domain. There are several features of an Alexa graph which indicate different things about that site's traffic statistics.

Alexa generates its traffic statistics by receiving and processing data sent automatically by web users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser.

Reach

"Reach" is usually expressed as a percentage of all internet users (in the form of a decimal) who visit a given site. For example, if 14% of all internet users visit en.wikipedia.org, the reach for that domain will be expressed on the graphs as "0.14".

Alexa publishes a "Movers & Shakers" list which features the sites whose reach has increased most significantly in a week, in comparison with previous weeks. The top three are shown in the graph on the front page of the Alexa site.

Page Views

The page views graph shows how many users with Alexa toolbars have visited the domain.

Multiple views of the same page within a day are not counted. Alexa also shows "Page Views per Visitor" statistics, which display the average number of unique pages viewed per day by visitors to the site.

Traffic Ranking

The information Alexa receives about page views and reach are combined to give every domain an overall traffic ranking. When you look at the traffic ranking graph or statistics of a site, the lower the number, the nearer to the top of the traffic ranking list is that site.

Uses of Alexa

Alexa can be quite useful for a rough estimate of how your site is doing, and how you compare with competitors. It can also give you a sense of which sites are the most popular, and prove a useful tool to help you with search engine optimisation.

Problems with Alexa

Alexa gets its statistics from users of the Alexa toolbar. There are several problems with this approach:

- Alexa toolbar users are not likely to be a representative sample of all internet users. They are likely to be webmasters, or at least have a passing interest in search engine optimisation. This is going to inevitably lead to biases towards some slices of the web and away from others.

- Alexa toolbar users are all Internet Explorer, Firefox or Mozilla users. Opera, Safari and Netscape users do not contribute to the statistics, and therefore sites relating to these browsers and others, as well as to related products, may be undercounted.

- The Alexa toolbar doesn't count https pages.

- Cultural, social and economic differences, as well as the distribution of advertising, can all have an effect on the bias of the results.

- Alexa statistics should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Do not rely on Alexa for your own site's traffic statistics.

By Brian Jackson

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