I say Alexa.. you say?
 

I'm curious what level people put Alexa stats and rankings on? I saw a thread of a guy complaining about his Alexa ranking.. I ask why, does that get you more sales or give your site any less worth?

This is why I like Alexa, I can see traffic trends, spikes and drops and you know that a crack 50 and less ranking will bring you some clout.

My issues:
- tool bars in browser are how they get ranks.. I don't have their tool bar
- Only IE and finally now firefox has the add-on so they get counted. So you mac heads, Oprano and other browsers you are no bodies and do not get counted.
- Odd discrepancies like smaller sites showing higher ranks and traffic than other site that you know are not the case so how does that work?

I know that this site www.compete.com has been gaining on Alexa for clout but that too has it's flaws. These sites tend to do a cross section like your TV's Neilson ratings, they only take a cross section and make assumpions from there.

Let me know your thoughts.

A few months ago someone showed me www.compete.com and I do refer to it once in awhile, but I still mainly use Alexa.
I don't put too much importance on Alexa, however, but I use them to give me an idea of how big a domain might be. The quality of the traffic flowing through a site is impossible for Alexa to determin unless someone can show me otherwise.

I use both. They're essential for me when trying to set up business with sites. I'll pass on sites that have a crappy ranking when looking for traffic and focus on the bigger ones--at least until I run out of whales. So far, though, whales are still in season ;)

I run both toolbars on one browser and use the other when things start to get clunky, as they often do. There has to be a better way to work them, though, as sometimes it makes browser almost unusable.

I use my server stats, it doesn't lie to me, it doesn't require surfers to have a toolbar... If people judge a site only by alexa then they are shooting themslefs in the foot a little bit.

Stack some adult TGP's against the HUN.. I have found that some 300K TGP's look to have better traffic ranks and traffic graphs than the hun and if you know the actual data is simply not possible.

Alexa traffic by country. The chart uses IP Address geolocation to pinpoint the country of origin for all Alexa Toolbar users. The results are a little surprising...

Users Pageviews Country
36.91% 23.72% United States
18.46% 25.57% China
4.59% 9.97% Hong Kong
4.49% 4.05% United Kingdom
4.01% 3.09% Canada
3.80% 6.53% Japan
2.56% 4.10% South Korea
1.72% 2.58% Taiwan
1.52% 1.73% Spain
1.46% 1.27% Germany
1.45% 1.11% Australia

I use these tools often and use compete to cross check a few things and of course get server stats. We have some new sites down pipe with Alexa traffic ranks below 40 but they have verifiable server stats to match. We can't wait as the traffic is through the roof. Jman is correct you cannot use these as a stand alone.

The way people talk about this is how they talk about google page rank meters in the past few years, page rank 6 does not = 6 figures worth of sales from your site.

This is true. You don't need high page rank to get a lot of traffic from Google. I have a blog that is #1 for a search term (which brings a LOT of traffic), yet the blog itself isn't even at PR0. It's not ranked at all, yet it is still indexed by Google. Strange.