Recently, someone I know asked for my help in getting a video campaign started. It seems that he was getting tired of actually paying for targeted traffic and wanted to gain just a small portion of the current Youtube / Viral Video frenzy.

Sounds reasonable, right? not always. He, like so many others get blinded by those numbers right below the video. You know… the views. Open up YouTube or one of the other video hosting sites and on the first page you get a list of current videos, many of which have been viewed millions of times. Those ridiculously high numbers seem to blind people to the point of losing all sense of marketing THEIR products.

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A few months back I decided to test something I really could not find a huge amount of information on in regards to accuracy, the Alexa rankings.

I have seen too many people place a lot of decision weight into a sites Alexa rank, sometimes being very disappointed, other times pleasantly surprised. I wanted to see how good the Alexa guesstimate really was.

Some people see it as the prime tool for site valuation while others dismiss it as fluff. I had to know for myself. Through my own sites and those of my clients I have a good deal of data for many different sites and I decided to track 4 sites and see how the Alexa data compared to the real metrics.

From what I know, Alexa uses ISP data as well as some user data to rate a sites traffic. I would imagine the data they collect serves as a sample group. The problem with sample groups is that unless the group is a true sample of the worlds internet user base, the results could be heavily skewed.

Now I am not sure if they base stats on samples, but, It would be kinda difficult to get data from every single user, so I assume its based on some type of sampling.

Alexa does state they use ISP data, I do not know which ISP’s, but there can be many issues with using an ISP as a sample of any population of internet users. For example, if the ISP data used is from a dial-up provider, you can expect that media based sites would suffer and your sample group would be occasional internet surfers, as opposed to daily die hards. If it was a dedicated line provider, it would be heavily business oriented. Sounds logical… right? anyway, I had to see how the 4 sites I picked did.

I used 2 sites that were well established, and 2 fairly new. The reason I chose these was because 1 new one and 1 old made a pair that received close to the same amount of real traffic (site 1 & 3, 2 & 4) and I wanted to see how accurate the rankings were.

The first established site had a traffic base between 1k and 2k daily, all visitors going to the homepage with 50% of the traffic coming from PPC.

The other well established site was an old single word domain that goes back to 1998, most traffic is organic SE and it consistently receives 800 to 1.3k daily.

The third site, was a newer blog that would receive 1k to 3k visitors to many different pages of which 1/3 to 1/2 would be the home page.

The last site was an informational site that was at about 600 daily with a growth that would put it in the 1k to 2k range within a few months.

At the beginning of the test period I logged the Alexa rank of all 4 sites.

I tracked this over 3 months because Alexa uses a 3 month average and I used these sites because they had close to the same page views and traffic

Here is how it looked when I started and I am rounding off the numbers

Site 1 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 725k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1k daily / alexa 800k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 700 daily / alexa 2M+ / page views 2

1 month later

Site 1 traffic 1.4k daily / alexa 660k / page views 2

Site 2 traffic 800 daily / alexa 165k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 2k daily / alexa 620k  / page views 1

Site 3 traffic 900 daily / alexa 1.5M+ / page views 2

2 months later

Site 1 traffic 1.3k daily / alexa 585k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 3k daily / alexa 260k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 670k / page views 2

Well, you can look at those numbers and make your own judgments on accuracy. The first thing that really amazed me is that site 1 and 2 are both established sites with single word domain names in the same type of traffic field (the same surfers would most likely visit both) Site 2 has always received less traffic than site 1 but 1/2 of site 1 traffic is ppc and site 2 Alexa score is incredibly better than site 1 when both sites are in the same niche and both are over 5 years old.

At this point I have 2 sites with little growth and that have not shown growth in years, also 2 sites that are growing. I did a few things to the first 2 sites to see how it tracked also site 3 had a roller coaster of a 3rd month.

Since its a bit long, I will save it for another post in a few days.

That Giant prize bunny gets smaller and smaller

Understanding the meaning of your website metrics is not always easy. I am a marketing and site traffic consultant. Last week, a very excited client asked my opinion of a website he was buying purely for its traffic. O.K., I kinda cringed when he told me and crossed my fingers hoping the numbers were as good as he believed them to be. Unfortunately, buying sites as a traffic source for another site does not always give the buyers their expected end results (tons of free, non ppc, traffic that they can convert as well as the ppc traffic they now receive).

So he goes on to tell me about the site. He loves the design, and has surfed the site himself for fun on several occasions. The content and subject is somewhat related to his field of business but the sites business model is based on advertising revenue and not product sales. He was not looking to change the business model even though the owner told him it was not doing well. He was looking to add that sites traffic to his current ppc traffic to boost his primary site sales. The seller showed him the logs and the site was getting 5k+ visits daily, thats 5 times what he gets from his ppc campaigns.

On his product site he averaged about 1k visits daily from ppc that convert at a fair rate of 11%. He was very excited at the opportunity of adding a good amount of that sites traffic to his own to grow his site and become less dependent on ppc.

He figured if he could get just a few % of those 5k to convert everything would be very rosey. In the excitement over free traffic, he missed some key issues.

Getting them to the “product” site from the “traffic” site in order to even try to convert them and the fact that the owner already told him the ad revenue was minimal (meaning those surfers aren’t to quick to check out the sites ads). Personally, I don’t think those issues even crossed his mind, he was just seeing this purely as traffic that he could somehow direct over to the shop.

OK, lets examine this

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