For Sale the value of Alexa

[zipper]

I have been using Alexa to deterine traffic value on expiring domains. I know that many Asian sites have highly inflated Alexa ratings so I have stayed away from them. I have used my personally owned websites to determine a "guesstimate" of the equivalent traffic to Alexa rating.

Recently I purchased a dropping domain through NameWinner that had an Alexa rating of 1,066,007. It did not have documents in the "Wayback Machine" archive, but the price was right. My guesstimate on traffic was around 100 visitors since I have a 4,119,827 that gets 50 visitors per day and a 503,084 that gets 640 per day.

I posted my files to the site yesterday afternoon and as of this morning there has not been visitor besides myself of course. So I am asking those who have been dealing with this longer than I have - what is the value of an alexa rating in the grand scheme of things?

 

[Duke]

Alexa will tell you right on their site that rankings above 100,000 are unreliable because of the very small traffic sample involved. Alexa only counts traffic from surfers that have installed the Alexa toolbar on their browser. Alexa claims millions have installed it. It is known that domainers and webmasters install the toolbar more than others because they are more interested in these statistics. As a result, domain related sites tend to be skewed to the high side because so many of the visitors are running the toolbar.

The higher the Alexa ranking the less likely someone can rig the rankings. At ATY.COM we have seen our Alexa ranking go from around 1 million to the top 13,000 in the last 4 months (not a domain related site) and the true traffic to our site has shown a corresponding huge increase. That came from a promotional campaign to have the celebrities who are our clients put banner links to ATY on their sites.

There is no substitute for real traffic numbers from the server. I don't think you can come up with a formula that will tell you how many true unique users a site is getting from the Alexa number. It is fun to track the number and use it as a broad yardstick. I wouldn't put much stock in it until the numbers get into the top 30,000-40,000 or so sites though. I have found most of the sites I visit in that range are good solid sites that do have a lot of people visiting.

 

[zipper]

Thanks Duke, for the advice.

The thing that makes me feel really clueless on this is I didn't have competition at NameWinner on this particular domain. I know you said that you felt there was no substitute for real traffic numbers from the server (albeit hard to comeby) and I agree completely. However, everything else I have ever bid on was very competitive at NameWinner, which makes me think that there is some other way that domain drop buyers are using to determine traffic and everyone but me knew that this domain was a stinker.;^)

If anyone else can enlighten this clueless one, it would be appreciated. I have already learned volumes from the wonderful people on this board and I might need to chalk this one up to "learning expense".

 

[Togoodhlth]

What I typically do if I am up in the air about a domain and it's traffic is go to Alexa. Check the numbers there then hit the wayback and see how recently the site was updated and how often it had been updated previously.
If it looks like it was just barely used I scratch it is simply a traffic name.
Next if I am still interested it hit marketleap.com and see how many links it has to it and where they are coming from (relative or just crap). Depending on the results there I may use the overture search term suggestion tool to see what their numbers look like (these numbers are not usally accurate however if it is like 1,000,000 searches vs 15 it is meaningful).
Last I hit google and yahoo to see what the results are for the domain.
This is all done very quickly and gives me enough information to make a decision.

Good luck.

John

 

[Duke]

Overture is a much better indicator if you get results WITH the extension. If you do, then the site is most likely getting steady visitors.

 

[diverge]

In late March I developed an internal site for a client, which was used by 20-some reps to access their database. This site is 100% intranet and password protected (but not SSL), and has a domain name for quick access (previously unregistered).

Granted this site is accessed by these 10-20 reps every day, and they spend up to 4 hours a day on the site, but imagine my surprise to find that this domain (previously unregistered) is already ranked at 99,000!

I always assumed that Alexa gauged their ranking based on unique visitors, but it appears that this is not the case. If my site could achieve this rank with NO search engine placement or type-in traffic, this means that ANY domain with a rank of 100,000 could, in fact, be totally WORTHLESS to a reseller.

Food for thought.

 

[Poker]

the value of Alexa

0

 

[zipper]

Thanks for the extra tips. I knew about Marketleap (but didn't think about going in and checking where the referrals are coming from to assess quality) , but the other ideas were new to me. Also the story from spfanstiel makes it clear how easy it is to screw up Alexa numbers completely.

I guess I'll take Alexa as only one piece of evidence weighed against others and then determine the value of all the info as a whole. Thanks again.

 

[Whois-Search]

What about top 10,000 ?

Traffic Rank for whois-search.com: 8,233

 

[Duke]

Originally posted by Whois-Search
What about top 10,000 ?

Traffic Rank for whois-search.com: 8,233

That is obviously excellent. Numbers that high are not something you can produce by sitting at the computer browsing your own site all day.

About the example of the closed intranet, if you looked at the breakdown Alexa will give you when you click on the ranking number, you would see that closed office ranked 99,000 had a fantastic page view ranking (because everyone in the office was clicking the site's pages all day), but they would have a terrible Reach ranking (unique visitors) because only a handful of people were generating the clicks. So you can learn more about what to think about a number when you click on Traffic Details. Anyone who did so would discount that office's 99,000 ranking (which isn't very good to begin with) because they could easily see in the breakdown that there were few visitors.

In any case, using it as just one of many tools in making a decision is the right way to go.

 

[TheBansche]

I agree Alexa is pretty useless above 100,000. My daughter's website is ranked 500k (15 visitors per week), my patriotic personal site is 164k (5 visitors per week, but I check my webmail 3 times a day from an alexa equipped machine)... Meanwhile my most popular domain (http://www.UtahBikiniTeam.com) is ranked 680k and gets 25 - 50 visitors per day from all over the US, Europe, and Latin America.

I mostly use Alexa for the Wayback machine and to see what websites link to the domain I want to buy.

Whois, my guess is that your ranking is skewed because a disproportionate number of domain speculators (your target audience) have the Alexa toolbar installed on their machines...since we all admit we use it for one thing or another. I don't know what the Alexa sample rate is, but I bet every one of us who hits your site is viewed by Alexa as 100 screaming fans. :laugh:

 

[bidawinner]

I'm still not to sure of Alxa , I downloaded the toolbar for about a week and decided not to use it. I figured the results have to be more "true" (on my sites) if I didnt have the toolbar .Otherwise the results would be skewed from me going to my site a couple times a day , or a few times a week as I am updating pages.

convention centers has a rank of around 251,000 ..

My "real" uniques are 175 unique visitors a day.. is that in line with other people's "real" results ?

 

[zipper]

My highest Alexa ranked site is 209,407 and has 1350 new uniques a day, so it seems Alexa numbers really are a buying a pig in a poke situation for anything greater than 100,000. At least at the 100,000 and above, you can see the collected data that they are basing the ranking on. But then again, not many 100,000 or above names get dropped.

 

[Togoodhlth]

Actually bid, I think they are a bit off.
One of my sites, chimineasinc.com, gets an average of 350-400 uniques per day and my traffic rank as of this posting is: 628,237

I also have boarder.com which gets about 100 uniques per day and has a traffic rank of: Uh oh! the rank just a couple of weeks ago was about 500,000 and now it is gone. Oh well.

At any rate what I was getting at is that generally speaking of the several sites which I own and for which I know the traffic they are ordered incorrectly in terms of the "real" traffic and therefore I can't judge them in comparison to anyone elses site.

Archive.org/wayback works great though!

 

[dictionaryof]

This is wholely off topic but Duke... Gotta get Jeff Gordon on ATY ;-)

 

[domnet]

Originally posted by dictionaryof
This is wholely off topic but Duke... Gotta get Jeff Gordon on ATY ;-)

dictionaryof, I didn't know you were a Nascar fan? Finally someone to talk some racin' with! I am friends with quite a few of the drivers and its amazing how much stuff they have to sign. Some have an entire room with stuff they need to autograph eventually...

 

[actnow]

No business tool is 100% You need to use a lot of variable information. Including your intuition.

Now, what is this telling us?

http://www.alexa.com/data/details?amzn_id=alexa65-tb-20&url=dnforum.com