Some caveats about Alexa. Data collected from Alexa comes from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.

If you’re in a tech-oriented space like online marketing or technology, you’d generally rank better than non-tech-oriented niches like scrapbooking or home repairs.

Alexa is not a comprehensive metric, but it’s useful to get a rough indication of your traffic and it’s origins.

That being said, Alexa has recently (within the last 24-48 hours) been tweaking the presentation of their traffic rankings so the information is presently in a holistic fashion.

There’s no “new” data being presented, but you can access it in a single screen now, where previously you had to flip between several screens.

Best of all, the service continues to be free.

What’re the major changes?

The “reach” has been changed to present the percentage of Internet users you’re reaching (eg. 5% of “all” Internet users), where previously it showed a reach of 100 users per million users.

In my opinion, it’s not a very useful metric.

“Traffic Rank” and “Page Views” don’t appear to have changed.

What’s interesting are 2 new metrics.

I don’t want you to get the idea that they’re “new”, but rather Alexa now aggregates the information from other screens and consolidates them on your “Traffic Ranking” page.

Here’s the first one:

Which is useful because Continue reading →