Hey you!  Yeah you, the one obsessing over your Alexa rank… you CEO, you “webmaster”, you marketing guy, you whomever you are…

STOP

Seriously… you people are driving me crazy with your Alexa rank whoring.  It’s the same few things over and over and over again that I hear:

  • WTF my traffic went up like eight fold and my Alexa ranking hasn’t changed!
  • OMG my Alexa ranking dropped like four million places but my traffic is still the same!

And I always answer with the same reply… Who fucking cares?!

First off you need to understand that the Alexa number has no bearing on your business in the slightest. It is a reflection of your business… and a cloudy one at that.  I know people that I swear would take a loss in traffic if it meant a gain on Alexa.  Where are your priorities?!

Second you need to understand that It’s an educated guess as to how your site may or may not being doing based on a very very very very small sample size of the entire Internet.  Do you even know a single person who has the Alexa Toolbar installed?

The last time I even HEARD of someone having the Alexa Toolbar installed I about punched them in the face for browsing my admin area (you know who you are) and having it prefollow all the delete links… luckily we did nightly backups.

Compete is even worse.  I have a property that was closed down in 2007 and they show I peaked my traffic in January of 2009… need I say more?

What about Hitwise vs comScore vs Nielsen?

Save your fucking cash… These giants will bend you over backwards, upside down, and rail you un-lubed till you’re broken and bleeding.  Ok that was a little strong but seriously… There are very few companies that should be subscribing to any of these services.  Unless you’re in the SEO market (and I mean providing SEO to clients), online marketing, or another broad sweeping / far reaching online company, you DON’T NEED IT.

You would do better to focus on improving your business rather than comparing yourself against your competitors… the real kicker is you’re comparing educated guesses against other educated guesses about numbers that really don’t matter!  If your competitor did 50% more sales than you are you going to know why from those numbers? No, you’re going to spend 200 hours looking at the numbers over and over again.

Nothing Else Matters

Instead, why not try looking at your competitors from the end user / customer’s point of view.  What do they offer that I don’t? How easy is it for me to checkout / purchase on their site compared to mine?  Then take an analytical top level approach to comparing your business. Where do they advertise?  Where does their traffic come from? Do they have an affiliate program?  One step further on the technical side you start asking… What is their page load time compared to mine? Where do they host? Do they use a CDN?

These are questions whose answers matter…

Don’t pay $30k – $50k a year for a service when you’re only interested in one market… hire someone full time to do nothing but run numbers for you.  It would be the same cost in the end except you’d employ more people and if you really wanted you could have them install the Alexa tool bar to bump up your fucking rank… groan

/endrant