Is the Alexa Ranking correct?

 

Alexa's traffic
rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling
3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach &
pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a
site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests
for a site. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is
ranked #1.



But is this
the correct way to judge or rank a website.




Apart from
the biased that it is based on the sample of Alexa tool bar users, it is
browser specific and it can be easily manipulated, the formula itself is
debatable.



We started
off by quoting the number of “Hits” for determining traffic of a website. But
eventually, we moved away from the term "hit" because everyone realized it was
pretty meaningless. A hit was often counted not just for a page load, but for
every element included on the page, as well. So if a site was less graphical
and had equal usage would register half the hits.




And then
came Reach and Pageviews.



As such, it
would not be fair to compare two websites that belong to different categories.
But measuring reach (number of unique visitors) is important because
mainstream advertisers want to reach a lot of people but not just the same
people over and over. It also gives an idea of popularity and growth of a
website.



Pageviews
became the primary metric not because they were more meaningful but because
they helped in closing Ads deals since Ads were sold primarily on a CPM basis
and its counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that
have nothing to do with actual usage.




Someone has
brilliantly analyzed that the part of the reason MySpace drives such an
amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible.



As the way
we interact with the web is changing, and technology makes it easier for users
to have access to multimedia content on a single web page, are page views
still relevant? AJAX, RSS, Feeds, Widgets. Streaming etc. are making things
worse.



So what's a
better way for comparison? Good question.



As I have
mentioned earlier also, it is not fair to compare two websites that belong to
different categories. The measurement of success also varies from website to
website. So it could be registered users, files uploaded/downloaded, posts,
hits, searches, revenue, and it may even be pageviews. But internal metrics
aren't enough, since we want to compare ourselves to other players in the
market. So we also need some apples-to-apples comparison.




If I had to
pick one, in addition to unique visitors (reach), I'd say time spent would be
much more useful than pageviews.

Time spent
interacting with a site is a much better basis on which to compare sites'
relative ability to capture attention/value than pageviews is. Especially when
it comes to media like audio or video, an increasing percentage of the web
consumption, time obviously means a great deal more than a pageview.



However,
time is a bit harder to measure.




HTTP doesn't
actually have a concept of time spent. So if you read this whole post and then
click off to another site, my web server won't know whether you were here for
five minutes or five seconds. I don’t even know whether you have been reading
this post for last 10 mins or you are having a coffee with this page open in
your browser.



Finally,
there's a big argument against time as a measure:




People don't
spend much time on Google search, because it gives them what they want so
fast, and they go away (which is obviously good for them and for users). But
the average time spent per visit will be very low.




And just as
pageviews can be gamed, you can slow your users down unnecessarily (or
accidentally because your servers are too slow) and increase time spent.


In short,
there's no easy solution but there's a BIG opportunity (though very tough job)
for someone to come up with a meaningful metric that weighs a bunch of
factors.