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 you get an idea how you rank across countries.

If you’re doing geographically-specific offers, you’ll be able to geo-target and geo-track a little easier.

Yes, you could use some of the analytics packages on your web host, but these quick stats give you a snapshot.

The second metric gives you a breakdown of your traffic geo-origins:

What I like about the information is it’s graphical presentation, compared to going through text-based traffic logs.

Besides using the tools to measure your own site, it’s useful to gauge the performance of merchants, affiliate networks and potential joint venture partners to get an idea of their reach.

Do remember that all traffic is not equal, and on the whole, the bulk of online transactions originate from the United States.