How Are You Doing? Competitive Intelligence with Alexa
By Peter Ishikawa
In "Competitive Intelligence on a Shoestring," Ian Graham [2005] includes checking out your competitors' websites, since they "contain a wealth of information regarding your competition and offer a good starting point for gathering a lot of information very quickly. Also, the information you gather while searching your competitors' sites can be used to help you refine additional Internet searches on your competition." He recommends paying special attention to the following:
- The "About Us" link has information on financials, management team, press releases.
- The "Team" link helps you contact people directly, or search for additional information.
- The "Career" pages provide insight into future directions, products and services if you read between the lines.
That's a good start, but there's an additional tool that can help you delve even deeper, especially with respect to traffic metrics and comparative traffic. In their day-to-day work, search engines collect a lot of information about the websites they index. One of these is Alexa Internet. Alexa (www.alexa.com) is a search engine with Google results, coupled with Open Directory (www.dmoz.com) subject indexing, Alexa's own detailed site information and statistics, packaged with Amazon.com's look and feel-and it's free.
The statistics Alexa gathers are of particular interest to your online business-they can help you analyze your own traffic for sure, but more importantly, they allow you to compare your own site's performance with that of your competitors.
Since early 1996, Alexa has been crawling the public Internet collecting data to create a range of useful products and services. These include site information such as traffic rankings and related links. They are currently gathering approximately 1.6 Terabytes (1600 gigabytes) of Web content per day. To date, Alexa has gathered data on more than 4.5 billion pages from over 16 million sites.
Although Alexa's services can be accessed directly from their site, it's much more efficient to download the Alexa Toolbar and have the resources available at your fingertips. The Toolbar is a free plug-in search and navigation companion for your browser (with a small footprint). It's already been downloaded over 10 million times. There isn't a version for Firefox (yet) though.
Although also useful to surfers, the extensive volume of detailed information available to webmasters about their own and competing sites on Alexa Internet is a gold mine. The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) provides an example. It's ranked 35th on Alexa's list of the highest traffic sites. Information provided about this site includes:
- Title, blurb, screenshot, URL, link
- Average review score (out of five stars)
- "People who visit this page also visit"
- Number of sites linking in
- Traffic rank, reach, page views
- Trend and comparative graphs
- Speed, launch date, contact information
- Evaluative site reviews
The trend graphs for traffic rank and reach can be viewed for different time periods and also be compared with up to four competing sites.
But most useful of all are the key traffic metrics Alexa provides: traffic rank, reach, and page views, defined by Alexa as follows:
Traffic Rank. This is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users).
Reach. Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million. Alexa's one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period.
Page Views. Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user). The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current page view numbers with those from three months ago.
A unique Alexa capability is their Wayback Machine. This provides links to archived Web site pages from 1966 to the present. A very cool feature, useful when wanting to see how a site has developed over time.
Apart from the generally-available information above, Alexa has also created a series of tools specifically for website owners that "offer the ability to increase trust, build user loyalty and make money." This slate of products and services, both fee-based and free, presently includes:
- The largest, most complete crawl/index available anywhere, with 2.5 billion unique URLs and growing. A variety of custom applications are available.
- XML data feed-Alexa's data covers hundreds of millions of sites and can be used to enhance your site or service with thumbnails, traffic rank data and more.
- Affiliate marketing-A custom toolbar can be offered by webmasters to their visitors. The webmaster then gets paid whenever the surfer makes an Amazon.com purchase.
- Certified traffic ranking-this button or banner is free and allows webmasters to show the world how their site stacks up, certified by Alexa's independent and trusted reputation.
- Certified site stats-this button or banner is similar to the previous one, but with more detailed certified information about the webmaster's site.
Peter Ishikawa is a Toronto-based marketer specializing in small and home-based businesses. Contact him at ichikawa@canada.com. Find more of his articles and other useful resources for online entrepreneurs like yourself at www.eBizTutors.com.
Reference
Ian Graham. "Competitive Intelligence on a Shoestring," Entrepreneur.com 08/26/05.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,323038,00.html.
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