Business
Tip: How
does your Website Rank on Alexa.com?
Curious
how your website visitor traffic ranks with other websites? Alexa.com
offers a fascinating ranking system that provides a quantitative
measure of your site's traffic. You might think of Alexa.com as
a form of Nielsen Ratings for websites.
http://www.alexa.com/
 For
example, let's take a look at the Alexa.com
report for CreativeTechs.com (a mini site info box is shown
at right). Our website was apparently the 655,689th most visited
website during the 3-month period ending Feb 27. Based on Alexa's
estimate of our current web traffic, if you took a random sample
of one million Internet users, you'd likely find that 1 of them
visited creativetechs.com last week. (Whoohoo - at least we're
on the map.)
Alexa.com
collects web traffic information through users of the Alexa
Toolbar and extrapolates the results. Because Alexa Toolbar
is Windows-only, the results may tend to under-report web traffic
to sites such as ours whose visitors are 61% Macintosh. Flash-based
websites may also tend to be under-reported.
How
could Alexa.com prove valuable to our audience of ad agencies,
design studios and in-house creative departments?
Evaluate
web traffic at your clients' websites. Run an Alexa.com
report on your clients' websites. Especially clients who might
be evaluating whether to redesign their site. Traffic reports
give an objective measure of their website's exposure, and can
help justify the cost of improvements to that website.
Evaluate
web traffic at your own website. I suspect this is where
everyone starts. Don't be discouraged if your studio's site is
not highly ranked. As a tool, Alexa appears to be geared to somewhat
active sites. CreativeTechs.com didn't show up at the bottom of
the chart until we started getting daily traffic of 500+ visits
on our tips site.
Evaluate
web traffic at the competition. Alexa is a great tool
for marketing types. Run the numbers for your clients. Differences
in web traffic between your client's website and their competition
is apt to spur any entrepreneur's competitive nature. If website
design appears to be a major factor, comparing the web traffic
results can help justify your creative fees.
Demonstrate
legitimacy. Some venture capital firms use results from
Alexa.com as an index to gage the legitimacy of a product or service
concept. Site rank on Alexa and Google can be one of the many
indicators of a concept's marketability. (Another great justification
for your creative fees!)
Help
us raise CreativeTechs' ranking! If you enjoy the work
we put into this weekly newsletter the best way to say thanks
is to help spread the word. Tell friends and colleges about our
weekly tips. Link to our tips website from your blog. And
give us a good review on Alexa.com. Thanks!
Source:
This tip inspired by frequent questions from web designers needing
to quantify their client's web traffic. We first found Alexa.com
through an graph showing the organic
growth of Wickopedia.com on Seth
Godin's Blog. Thanks to Jane Lindley at Super
Web Group for the tip on Alexa and VC -- also for the recent
mention in her email
newsletter!
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