Alexa's traffic tracking tool

I haven't been visiting the Alexa.com website for quite a while. Possibly, it had been almost a year ago that I went to check how Alexa was tracking visitors to JobStreet.com. But last week, something prodded me to revisit Alexa.

If you don't know much about Alexa Internet Inc, it's a company that provides web traffic information to users. Alexa itself is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. The web traffic data changes daily but over a medium term, it provides a relatively good picture of a website's popularity or usefulness. Some say that Alexa's statistics is not accurate but many people still continue to use Alexa statistics as a benchmark or yardstick. This becomes very useful when you want to make relative comparison between different websites.

For example, when I was visiting Alexa earlier, I could actually view the graph that tracked visits to JobStreet.com over the past year. I could view the traffic history according to reach, rank and page views. What's more, I decided to make a comparison between JobStreet.com and another online recruitment website. As you can see from the picture, it's a real cool comparison tool.

Alexa also gives information on how a website ranks in popularity among Internet users. Taking JobStreet.com again as an example, I see that our overall ranking in the world is 820, meaning this is among the top 1,000 websites globally.

BTW, Alexa provides a very nifty toolbar that you can instal into your browser software. Once installed, you'll see a small unobstrusive graph at the bottom corner of the browser that gives the latest tracking information. So far, I see it working only on computers that use Internet Explorer and FireFox. Download this toolbar and give it a try if you're using any of these browsers.

Comments

[sarah]

Dude alexa sucks - Use quantcast or compete....alexa is like so 1998