Mr Pappagiorgio has reached “Super Elite” Status
I’m fairly new to the whole blogging world, and the site itself is only about a month old. So things like traffic tracking, Google Rankings, and Alexa Rankings are pretty foreign to me. When I have questions about stuff like that, I take them to my good buddy GrandmasterB, fellow blogger from www.grandmasterb.com. So looking at DNScoop last night I noticed my Alexa graph had a huge spike on June 4th. So I told him my Alexa ranking for June 4th was 97,543. His response was, somthing like “You mean 975,000?” I said no, 97,543. He followed that by stating “you have to be super elite site to get that section filled.” My only response could be, “I Guess I’m Super Elite.” But this brings up an interesting question. How accurate are numbers from places like DNScoop, Siteamount, Google Analytics, and Alexa?
I’m sorry if you viewed the first paragraph on the front page, and clicked read more expecting answers, because I really don’t know these answers. Hopefully I’ll get someone to view this post that knows about these types of things and can leave a comment explaining possible answers.
To get ranked that high even for daily traffic, you would think the site would have to receive a minimum of 1000 visitors. Minimum right? That’s probably a horribly low estimate as well to get a daily Alexa ranking of 97k. Yet, when I go to my Google Analytics page, it shows I had somewhere around 250 unique visitors on that day. A far cry, from what I would think, would get your Alexa ranking to spike that high for the day.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting because on another day I received similar traffic (According to Google Analytics), there was no spike on my Alexa graph. It just doesn’t make much sense, and not that I worry about it too much, but it would be nice to have some kind of explanation as to why all these numbers could be so much different. And what kind of traffic did I really get on June 4th to receive a 97k Alexa ranking for the day?
Alexa used to use the Alexa toolbar to determine the approximate traffic and rank of websites. This made it very inaccurate - because each Alexa Toolbar user would represent a multitude of users. If you got a few dedicated users all with the Alexa toolbar (a few years ago), you could easily get to 10,000 or so in Alexa with 10 uniques per day or so.
Nowadays, Alexa has changed a bit and is using a few more sources for it’s ranking - but they’re all secondary sources.
Use Analytics to determine your traffic - Google takes it directly from your site - so it’s more accurate.
Edwards last blog post..Aggressive Link Building Techniques
I still don’t know what would cause such a huge spike. Pretty crazy stuff indeed.
Bryans last blog post..The Right Category Makes a World of Difference
Thanks for stopping by with an informative post Edward! It does make sense, but I also hear rumblings here or there questioning even how accurate Google Analytics are?
There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. If http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the internet user population, Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate.