Alexa curve
In my articles and studies, I used Alexa rating from time to time to get at least some information about the traffic of a particular site. Recently, I began to receive comments indicating Alexa's incorrectness. This is not news to me, but ...
The truth is that Alexa is REALLY incorrect. Extremely incorrect. I always thought that Alexa could still be useful in certain cases. But today I did a little research (the idea is taken from a small article about Digg and Alexa on Mashable.com , thanks), and I came to the conclusion that Alexa is not only inaccurate , but also useless . His data charts are almost random . See for yourself.
Alexa supposedly works in the following way: it logs the actions of users who have the Alexa toolbar installed, and from there it displays its data. I always thought: well, this is a certain percentage of Internet users, just as Firefox users make up a certain percentage of Internet users. Therefore, it may not be absolutely accurate, but still somewhat correct, right? Wrong. Alexa gives out completely incorrect and, apparently, random data.
Well, how then does Alexa calculate traffic? There are many guesses about this. Truth be told, after my little research, this is no longer interesting to me. The fact is that it is definitely not connected with real traffic. Some people say that you can influence site traffic using the Alexa toolbar. For example, if you and a couple of your buddies set up an Alexa panel, then your site will grow dramatically in Alexa ranking. It looks like the truth, but it still doesn’t explain how this damn rating works, because in this case it turns out that almost no one uses this panel. That may also be true. As I said, it doesn't matter.
Do you know why? Because Alexa is not the only free service that evaluates Internet traffic. The most significant alternatives are SnapShot , Quantcast , and Google Trends . Using the example of several sites, we can compare charts with a rating issued by different services. You should have already guessed: the graphics for the services just mentioned are reasonably consistent , but the graphs on Alexa are completely different .
This leads me to conclude that any of these services are better than Alexa. Probably, when conducting a serious study, the best approach would be to compare the results of all these services.
And now - the bare facts. Data that does not need comments. In the following three examples, I took sites with predictable traffic ratios from completely different areas. I did not set out to set Alexa in a bad light, I just took the first 9 sites that came to my mind. In all three tests, Alexa shows significant and unexplained differences from other sites that measure traffic. Here are the results (by the way, you can ignore the timeline, the differences are so big):
flurl.com , pitchforkmedia.com , metacafe.com - everyone except Alexa has Metacafe above others. In addition, Alexa shows a big hump for traffic Flurl, starting in August 2006. We see nothing of the kind in the other graphs.
penny-arcade.com , pvponline.com , dilbert.com - the battle of online comics! Google Trends does not have enough data to compare these sites, so its data is not given. The results on all three graphs are similar, with one, but significant difference: Snapshot and Quantcast show that Penny-Arcade traffic is slowly falling, while at Alexa it is growing.
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digg.com , facebook.com , imdb.com - this time I selected heavyweights and again confusion in the ranks of traffic measuring sites.
Fact: Everyone except Alexa put Digg in third place, MUCH behind the other two. Fact: Facebook looks quite bad on the Alexa chart compared to other graphs. However, since in this case all the graphs give us different data, I conclude that at least two traffic meter sites make a mistake here. I believe that the Google Trends and Snapshot data is more accurate, although I do not have facts that could justify this. One thing is absolutely certain: Alexa gives absolutely incorrect data on Facebook, since lately Facebook has been subjected to intensive analysis and many analysts include it in the top ten among all sites.
So, what conclusion can we draw from all this? Although my methods are not strictly scientific, I believe that this brief analysis gives a good assessment of the quality of Alexa ratings. and this evaluation is as follows: Alexa curve . Even if you try to use Alexa data in comparison with the data of the other three sites mentioned above, the results will be useless, because Alexa rankings are so different from the rest that they simply destroy your schedules.
Conclusion: even though I used Alexa ratings for analysis in the past, in the future I will avoid them, or at least check back three times using other services.
The truth is that Alexa is REALLY incorrect. Extremely incorrect. I always thought that Alexa could still be useful in certain cases. But today I did a little research (the idea is taken from a small article about Digg and Alexa on Mashable.com , thanks), and I came to the conclusion that Alexa is not only inaccurate , but also useless . His data charts are almost random . See for yourself.
Alexa supposedly works in the following way: it logs the actions of users who have the Alexa toolbar installed, and from there it displays its data. I always thought: well, this is a certain percentage of Internet users, just as Firefox users make up a certain percentage of Internet users. Therefore, it may not be absolutely accurate, but still somewhat correct, right? Wrong. Alexa gives out completely incorrect and, apparently, random data.
Well, how then does Alexa calculate traffic? There are many guesses about this. Truth be told, after my little research, this is no longer interesting to me. The fact is that it is definitely not connected with real traffic. Some people say that you can influence site traffic using the Alexa toolbar. For example, if you and a couple of your buddies set up an Alexa panel, then your site will grow dramatically in Alexa ranking. It looks like the truth, but it still doesn’t explain how this damn rating works, because in this case it turns out that almost no one uses this panel. That may also be true. As I said, it doesn't matter.
Do you know why? Because Alexa is not the only free service that evaluates Internet traffic. The most significant alternatives are SnapShot , Quantcast , and Google Trends . Using the example of several sites, we can compare charts with a rating issued by different services. You should have already guessed: the graphics for the services just mentioned are reasonably consistent , but the graphs on Alexa are completely different .
This leads me to conclude that any of these services are better than Alexa. Probably, when conducting a serious study, the best approach would be to compare the results of all these services.
And now - the bare facts. Data that does not need comments. In the following three examples, I took sites with predictable traffic ratios from completely different areas. I did not set out to set Alexa in a bad light, I just took the first 9 sites that came to my mind. In all three tests, Alexa shows significant and unexplained differences from other sites that measure traffic. Here are the results (by the way, you can ignore the timeline, the differences are so big):
flurl.com , pitchforkmedia.com , metacafe.com - everyone except Alexa has Metacafe above others. In addition, Alexa shows a big hump for traffic Flurl, starting in August 2006. We see nothing of the kind in the other graphs.
penny-arcade.com , pvponline.com , dilbert.com - the battle of online comics! Google Trends does not have enough data to compare these sites, so its data is not given. The results on all three graphs are similar, with one, but significant difference: Snapshot and Quantcast show that Penny-Arcade traffic is slowly falling, while at Alexa it is growing.
/>
digg.com , facebook.com , imdb.com - this time I selected heavyweights and again confusion in the ranks of traffic measuring sites.
Fact: Everyone except Alexa put Digg in third place, MUCH behind the other two. Fact: Facebook looks quite bad on the Alexa chart compared to other graphs. However, since in this case all the graphs give us different data, I conclude that at least two traffic meter sites make a mistake here. I believe that the Google Trends and Snapshot data is more accurate, although I do not have facts that could justify this. One thing is absolutely certain: Alexa gives absolutely incorrect data on Facebook, since lately Facebook has been subjected to intensive analysis and many analysts include it in the top ten among all sites.
So, what conclusion can we draw from all this? Although my methods are not strictly scientific, I believe that this brief analysis gives a good assessment of the quality of Alexa ratings. and this evaluation is as follows: Alexa curve . Even if you try to use Alexa data in comparison with the data of the other three sites mentioned above, the results will be useless, because Alexa rankings are so different from the rest that they simply destroy your schedules.
Conclusion: even though I used Alexa ratings for analysis in the past, in the future I will avoid them, or at least check back three times using other services.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/30953/
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