Stop relying on/using Alexa

I said it often, and still discuss with too many people bringing Alexa as a reference.

Om Malik explains it better than me. Alexa IS NOT RELIABLE AND EVEN WRONG. Period

Why so many use/mention it then? because it is free. And if you don t have money to buy reliable analytics from Hitwise, Nielsen or Comscore use Quantcast or Compete and compare them all.

this is a special message for whoever i will meet in the close future…

Comments

[Lucky Dragon]

You must be right that Alexa cannot be accurate. But I find it very effective for "orders of magnitude" comparisons. That is, if Alexa "says" news site #1 is 5 times more popular than #2, they could be wrong and it is actually 10 times (or only two times) more popular, but the general rank is right.
And of course, page views is not good for more than "order of magnitude" anyways - you do not know how much time people spent there, did they buy anything, click thrus etc.
So Alexa is not good for figuring the exact valuation of a site you are planning to buy (for example),
but it is very good to "weed out self serving BS" - e.g. if (just a generic example) Israeli company claims their content (say video) site is close in popularity to the number one video site in the world, and in Alexa you see the ratio is more like 20:1 in favour of the large site, there is a good chance you are being sold BS....:-)

[ouriel]

I do not agree. i have met many timnes (including very famous startups) that even comparison ratio can prove wrong. I stopped using alexa for a while now.

Any personns knowing seriously analytics will confirm.

[Lucky Dragon]

the claim that "any persons knowing seriously analytics will confirm", besides being hard to decipher for English readers, is not very convincing. You may find that what Web 2.0 Gurus call "Analytics" is really a (rather trivial and inferior) branch of what used to be known as "statistics". Being somewhat educated in statistics (I am a really old guy what can I do) I've read Malik's (justified) criticism of Alexa, it does not mean Alexa cannot tell you quite accurately that Google is more popular than Ynet, or that Ynet is more popular than Nrg (sorry guys).
So I guess I'm saying that "Alexa is nothing" is about as incorrect as "Alexa is everything". Still, it can definitely serve as an efficient trend analyser and help you get a feel for where the wind (not the hot air) is blowing..

[ouriel]

Lucky Dragon, i have come across too many contradictions comparing Alexa with real internal data of many companies to consider it even as a beginning trend indicator. This is my personnal experience. Not the one of expert in analytics. And that s enough for me to adopt and "nothing at all attitude"

[kwa]

If your site is not written in English, using any of the above tools would lead to wrong results, since all of them are mainly English-related or United-States-related.

All of the above sites appeared to underestimate the audience of a site of mine (about 200.000 unique visitors a month) by a factor of 100 to 1.000. Since I installed the Alexa Toolbar (as every webmaster do), my site's audience as seen as by Alexa grew by a factor of... plenty, while still underestimated. That becomes ridiculous.

Quantcast appeared more accurate once I installed their marker. However, it doesn't add very much compared to Google Analytics or Xiti (that last one is able to make your analytics public).