site popularity meter

[Chas]

What's people's views on site popularity meter? - for those of you who haven't heard of it.... it tracks how many visits people (who have the Alexa toolbar installed) make to sites and ranks them accordingly.

A reliable rough guide to how popular sites are? or due to the limited amount of people who use it -- it's no guide at all?

If your site not listed in Alexa (returns a rank = 0) you can submit here

[billiousness]

i was wary of the alexa results when i first heard about the concept but once i saw that all three of my australian based and marketed sites were ranked i changed my mind because i concluded that they must have quite a large and broad user base using the toolbar for my sites to get ranked.

[Jeremy W.]

Yeah, every site I own was ranked. RingQuest was ranked 40,000... What is considered "good"? SitePoint is ranked 20,000 ish.

[aspen]

My literature site:

Avg. Traffic Rank: 52,233

Wilderness Survival Site:

Avg. Traffic Rank: 249,726

So I guess lower is better right?

Literature site during the school year gets around 40k page views a day, during the summer 20-25k. (now).

Survival site sites right around 6k a day year round on average.

Alexa definitely has a large user base, the only thing I can think of that could skew it would be demographics. They may have more a certain type of people using their service. For instance more computer literature people.

[billiousness]

well my sites are all ranked in the millions so 40,000 is great if you asked me. but it is all relative to your own business/marketing objectives and not really a representative to measure, compare and analyse site stats.

i just thought it was suprising that there were enough australian users who surfed my site actually had the toolbar thing. when i typed my addresses in i thought "there is no way i'm going to be ranked" i was happy enough being on there.

it is also a good ego thing "my site is better than this site and this site" so it gives so small glimpse into your competitors situation which is always cool.

another aspect i like is the brief consumer behaviour summary of where else your sites visitors go. always good for devloping joint promotion and other marketing tactics.

[Golgotha]

looks like the only results it uses are from Google, so nothing to submit too.

[Jeremy W.]

It's totally separate of everything, more info can be found on the Alexa site. As users browse sites, it returns information, thereby making Alexa better as time goes on. I used it when it first came out, but info was sparse even though the concept was great.

[Automated]

I am very pleased as one of my sites is ranked 140,000 not great but better that 6,000,000. THe lower the number the better.

This is a little off topic but who owns the #1 traffic ranking on alexa? I cannot find it.

I also think that the target audience of the site has a lot to do with it. As people who are net savvy dont usually fall for the install our toolbar trick. I use the google one but that is only becuase it assists me in finding sites with a high PR



Matthew Taylor

[dhtmlgod]

My e4ums site is 603,564

The #1 is yahoo... i think

[Chas]

According to Alexa my site's the #1 Flash showcase (90,725) behind Macromedia's -- big up!

I think its a useful tool for picking sites to advertise on ie. PPC's.

They also seem to update the stats monthly

[WindSun]

Alexa has nothing to do with Google - it tracks which sites you go to, and where you came from and went to.

Useful info sometimes, but a few results are outdated on less popular sites, but it has been getting a lot better lately as more people use it.

[dpickup]

I used to have the Alexa toolbar installed but I found it slowed down the opening of my windows too much so I un-installed it. I still check the results every so often on their site - it all seems a little arbitrary and none-too-clear. More than anything I check to see if the ranks have improved and how we're faring against competition. I also find the "People who visit this page also visit" section interesting. Our two sites have rankings of 35,410 and 42,393 respectively.

[Archbob]

As I only advertise for big networks, I prefer to keep my stats private so I use webtrendslive. But I will say alexa is a useful tool when I'm deciding on link exchanges.

[AlexW]

I've been using popmeter for quite a while now and think it's pretty useful. Yes, there are inconsistencies inherent in the sample group, but I had a chance to compare the relative results of free, little popmeter with corporate-level (read expensive) stats generated from analyzing lots of the larger ISP log files. Popmeters results were totally in line with what the ISP based stats were saying.

It's most useful for comparing yourself with nearest competitors. Sometimes sites that makes lots of noise and look impresssive have much less traffic than you would guess. Popmeter is good for showing them up.

I was thinking. I wonder if we could take some traffic levels that we can verify and develop a formula to infer real traffic from that? Say, rank 500 translates to around 45,000 uniques/day, rank 20,000 is 10,000 uniques and so on.

BTW, Sofnik do a really nice little domain name generator (DNA) which I highly recommend.

[Lister14]

i'll try this out and come back ot you...

looks cool