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901am is huge!…in Australia

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alexaOn Friday the Amazon owned Alexa rolled out some interesting new free traffic analysis additions to their long established traffic ranking/ rating service. According to Alexa’s blog, the new tools include the ability to track where visitors to a site come from, traffic rank via country and reach percentages.

The great news for the owner of this blog, David Krug, is that 901am is huge!…in Australia:

alexa

Mind you, it could be that I’m one of only a handful of Alexa users in Australia and my use of the Search Status plugin for Firefox is skewing the figures.

On a more serious note though, it’s interesting to note how the traffic differs per country. Unlike comScore and Compete which only track US traffic, for all it’s arguable flaws, Alexa really does have the best global tracking reach of any service out there. Consider this, as I write this post 901am has a 3 month average traffic rank at Alexa of 30,827, and yet in the 4 biggest English speaking markets (US, UK, Canada and Australia), the average 3 month traffic rank rank is 9309. If you ignore the fact that for some reason the English don’t love the site as much as the other 3, take that figure out, you get an average 3 month traffic ranking of 6047…and yet the overall site ranking is 30,827.

What this all means? probably not a lot to most people. What it does do however is highlight the need to gain a broad international audience to do well in Alexa. Also given the regular use of Alexa by advertisers as a way of measuring a sites worth, expect to see a huge switch over time (possibly months once some one works out how to pull the new figures from the site via its API) of advertisers moving away from using the over all Alexa site traffic ranking to using country specific rankings, particularly the US figure, given 95% of all advertisers are based in the US, or are marketing to that market.

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Originally posted on February 18, 2007 @ 12:38 am

Comments

  1. Cool – we Aussies are usually very early adopters (said very tounge-in-cheek).

    But seriously, I don’t like the idea that advertisers use Alexa stats so heavily to gauge a sites reach and popularity in deciding whether to advertise with them.

    I wonder if there are detailed stats on the numbers of alexa toolbar users, which countries and which industries – and percentages.

    That said, Alexa should be trying to push their toolbar aggressively throughout the web so that we can get a better sampling.