Alexa.com, run by Alexa Internet Inc, is a subsidiary of the e-commerce giant Amazon.
Amazon plans to shut the service down soon though wrapping it up at the beginning of May 2022.
But the company that stayed around in the competitive world of web analytics for two and a half decades deserves a bit of a deep dive into how reliable it is.
What Does Alexa Do?
In a nutshell, Alexa gives websites a ranking in terms of their popularity compared to other websites.
It looks at the visit frequency of sites and makes the data available for everyone to see.
Alexa boasts a massive database of over 300 million pages on the internet that it has analyzed over the years.
The methodology used is relatively straightforward.
It has two components:
- Reach: This metric represents the number of people who visit a specific page on a particular day.
- Page views: Here, the number of views of a page in a day are checked – one user can, of course, view a page multiple times.
The data is analyzed for the latest three-month period to ensure recency.
Direct numbers aren’t shared.
The rank tells you how you’ve fared versus other sites.
What Efforts Does Alexa Make To Maintain Accuracy?
Alexa’s data’s foundation is its panel.
This panel is a sample of worldwide web traffic.
In addition to the panel, Alexa allows websites to run a special script that enables Alexa to gather traffic data directly.
This type of data is what they call “certified metrics.”
So How Reliable Is It Really?
There are many sides to Alexa’s accuracy.
Right off the bat, let’s see what the site itself says.
Alexa clearly states that data for sites with a lower rank (100000 or lower) tend to fluctuate massively.
Their performance can be seen as random at times.
Because on some occasions, they may show no data at all, and at other times, they might rise in the rankings very quickly.
They relate this great degree of variance to sites with 1000 users or less.
So now that we’re aware of Alexa’s disclaimer, let’s see what an authoritative voice with a site that’s pretty big says.
Rand Fishkin of Moz tested Alexa and other third-party data providers a while back on his website.
In terms of per cent reach, Fishkin applauded Alexa for correctly picking up its traffic’s dip in late 2011.
However, he questioned the long-term data trend that Alexa showed and the site’s overall ranking.
Similarly, Neil Patel ran Google Analytics data compared to Alexa for several metrics.
Those metrics included pageviews per user bounce rate, percentage time-on-site, and search percentage.
In all cases, there was a marked difference between the two.
Overall, Alexa had a good and prolonged run and was at times considered a staple and go-to for understanding web performance.
But while Alexa will soon be out of the picture, healthy competition within the SEO analytics niche means better alternatives will always be around!