Internet Traffic

It's true Alexa only tracks sites that have the Alexa toolbar installed--but that is millions of sites, including most of the major sites. It gives a far better idea of where you stand vs. nothing.

There is nothing perfect about the internet, including getting data on yourself vs. your competition. The more data you can pull together, the better.

Using traffic estimate or Alexa isn't going to give you accurate data. Using either alone is better than nothing. Using both together gives you more data. Looking at your competitor's link popularity will also help (you'll have to use a number of different link popularity tools since none are accurate and all bring back different numbers--even if they are polling the same search engines).

Researching competitors--any part of their business--requires getting as much data as possible. And when you're dealing with something as difficult to track as web statistics and traffic, throwing any resource out as unreliable or too confined is dangerous. You have to gather data from as many places as possible and then make some reasonable, educated estimates.

The Alexa toolbar is not installed on "sites" but instead is installed on a user's computer. This is how Alexa is able to track a toolbar user's usage patterns.

The fact that Alexa traffic data is unreliable and biased is something that even Alexa admits and posts on their website.

Alexa - Important Disclaimers: http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more

The point is that you have to use all the resources at your disposal because they are all unreliable. When using unreliable date, you gather as much data as possible and compare and contrast. You're simply trying to get as much information as possible and then make your best estimate.

If there were a reliable source, that'd be one thing. But when you go in knowing that everything you see is unreliable, you need as much information as possible from as many sources as possible.

Well put, Alexa is not a valid resource for monitoring web site traffic.

There are several resources available but if you are serious about monitoring your web site traffic you need to look at something like Google Analytics. This is a free service offered by Google and has comparable features as other programs which could cost you hundreds of dollars.

How do you see other people's traffic?

You won't get accurate traffic counts for other websites without going to the source.

P.S. To give you an idea of just how unrelated Alexa's Traffic Rankings and true traffic counts can be I know of a website that receives over two hundred thousand (200K) monthly visitors, yes visitors not hits, with an Alexa Traffic Rank today of 563,358.

200,000 visitors a month is a huge amount of traffic. Yeah I'd say Alexa's traffic rankings can be off.

I have never heard this about Alexa and the tool bar thing. My traffic has grown substantially, and has actually surpassed several of my competitors. To find out it might not be accurate is

I can't imagine all of these people visiting my site actually have an Alexa toolbar.

If you use google analytics, it shows traffic pretty well. Also, most hosting companies also have reports of some type. I use ipowerweb.com and theirs are pretty decent.

I thought that was an indication of the rank of most visited sites? How do you know that this site with 200k visitors isn't 500,000th? Just curious. I really have no idea. I got the impression it is just a ranking based on a finite snippet of time. Like for the past 60 days or something....

+200K Visitors, +19M Hits and +4.5M Page Views. For most websites that qualifies as "Huge".