Alexa.Com

If you are curious about the the number of visitors or traffic ranking for sites on the Internet around the globe or by country check out Alexa.  The site is fascinating because it enables you to see where the well known Internet brands rank in terms of usage and it also might provide you new sites/tools to use to market, sell, and conduct competitive intelligence research for your business.

Comments

[Alex]

Matt,
Alexa is a strange beast. I do agree that it is one of a kind in terms of providing great top-level traffic information. However, Alexa should come with a disclaimer. It works by collecting info from people that have downloaded the Alexa toolbar. Now, on one hand (and I'm generalizing here), the law of large numbers generally estimates that in a big enough sample of people would normalize any abnormalities and resemble the behavior of the population. However, the people that seem to have downloaded the toolbar are predominantly proud members of the web 2.0/geek crowd; and as such, they significantly bias the traffic rankings. An example of this is when comparing Planypus to some sites, which have significantly more traffic than us, Alexa shows the opposite. Also, when modeling/looking for a pattern in the Alexa ratings (to forecast Planypus growth) across web 2.0 and non-web 2.0 websites, I failed to arrive at a linear/exponential/ratio/regression relationship between the Alexa rating and the true traffic of the website (per 3rd party). My point, after this long ramble , is that Alexa is good for a very highlevel observation of site-traffic but is not yet good for an in-depth analysis of the industry.