Why Alexa ranking is flawed and advertisers should beware

A growing number of website owners, particularly bloggers or would I say new bloggers tend to get so excited when their Alexa rankings improve over a short period of time. The question really is, "Does Alexa rankings really mattter?".

What I've come to know about Alexa ranking system is that it heavily relies on Alexa toolbar users and these consists mainly of internet geeks, webmasters, bloggers and IT guys who are basically interested in how their sites perform relative to other sites on Alexa. The bottomline is, the Alexa ranking system for a particular website can easily be influenced by even a single Alexa toolbar user. If that user simply installs Alexa toolbar on his browser and keeps visiting his site, his Alexa ranking would ultimately rise higher. If more bloggers and internet geeks also visit the particular site, chances are that the Alexa ranking would also improve since they are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar already installed on their site.

The Alexa ranking is not exactly a function of the number of unique visitors to a website since there are better tools for doing this like Google Webmaster tools and Analytics. The Alexa ranking would probably work best if all internet users actually had the toolbar installed but the problem is that the majority of the few people who have them installed are not exactly potential online buyers and that's why online advertisers should re-consider when advertising on a website based on their Alexa ranking.

On the part of advertisers looking for a website to targed ads on, making a decision based on just the Alexa ranking would be a wrong decision. There is a need for them to seek a third party's opinion on the actual traffic in terms of page views or unique views a website actually gets and there are already numerous tools to do this. On the website owner's part, he could make use of Google analytics by installing it and then publishing it for potential advertisers using a third party traffic reporting site such as seekthestats.com.

The third party traffic reporting site allows both potential advertisers and website publishers to view the traffic the site is actually getting so that they would be making a good decision. It is not really wise to just invest in a website just because the ALexa ranking says 100. Alexa rankings can easily be manipulated in the short term or even the long term and may not necessarily reflect the true website stats for a particular website.

Some niche sites do well in Google search results but don't do much when it comes to Alexa.

I had an experience once when I installed the Alexa toolbar in my browser and my site's ranking entered the top 50 for top Nigerian websites. I later uninstalled it since I don't really trust the report and didn't want people visiting my website just because it had a good Alexa ranking. I think the best thing is for both website owners and advertisers to focus less on Alexa rankings and more on independent stat reports to knowing the true value of a website.