The Real Problem With Alexa

Alexa drives me nuts. It uses a broken methodology to measure the internet and is, for reasons unclear to anyone, regarded as somehow definitive simply because it allows you to compare two sites with a single simple number. Its sampling methodology is flawed and the numbers it produces are meaningless. And if you want to help me prove this, please install their toolbar. Of course since most of you are Slashdot readers, most of you won't and that only helps prove my point. Read on for what I mean by all of this, and why it matters.

As the defacto 'Guy in Charge' of a reasonably large web site, I am routinely asked questions by a variety of people that lead inevitably to Alexa. It might be a question from my Boss at SourceForge about traffic. Or it might be a sales guy asked by a possible advertiser why some other random website is bigger or smaller than Slashdot. Most often it's a random reporter doing background for a story that has nothing to do with Slashdot. Why I'm considered an expert is very confusing, but why they always regard Alexa rankings as meaningful is even more so.

Here's the problem: Alexa doesn't work because of who will install it, and perhaps more importantly, who won't. Let's start with a place I'm very familiar with: Slashdot readers. Until recently Alexa didn't work on Firefox... instead only IE users participated. On the internet as a whole that's fine: like 80% of users run IE. But on Slashdot only like a quarter of you do.

What about re-installing the plug-in after you update your browser? When Firefox 2.0 came out, almost a third of Slashdot readers upgraded within a few days. You upgrade Minor Firefox releases overnight. Even IE users of Slashdot update relatively fast, from 6 to 7 or even minor revisions. New versions often break old plug-ins. When you get that alert that a plug-in is out of date do you just forget about it? I know I do. And that's not even counting clean OS installs. But if I went to random non-technical friends and family installations, I frequently see versions of software so dated it makes me cringe.

And that's not even talking about the fact that Alexa's toolbar is pretty much spyware. How many Slashdot readers are giddy to install spyware? You either? Big surprise. Because of who we are, and what it is, our population will self select out of consideration.

Did you know Alexa excludes SSL? How many etrade users do you think there are? Now personally I'm glad that they aren't tracking my browsing at my credit card company, but it's just another factor reducing accuracy.

Equally perplexing is the accounting of iframes. Let's look at someone like double click's alexa rating. Now it's hard to say, but I don't think I've ever visited their website. Have you? But according to Alexa, they have nearly a 1% share of the internet. I'd tend not to believe it... but they have iframes on zillions of web pages and counting those sure would account for this huge ranking. What about all those badges for the popular social networking websites? What influence are those iframes having on Alexa rankings? Alexa's FAQ says they don't count, but I'm skeptical.

In Fact, Alexa KNOWS that it is a flawed metric for measuring. Have you ever tried actually looking up alexa on alexa? Unsurprisingly, it is unavailable. Why? Visitors to Alexa.com would be the most likely of any user population on-line to have installed their plug-in. I don't know what their 'Rank' would be, but I bet it clearly would be an apples to oranges comparison against ANY other site on-line.

Of course who do you think actually will go out of their way to install something like this? I have a good guess... if you are obsessed with acronyms like SEO or terms like PageRank you are very likely to care very much about these things. I spend a real percentage of my week dealing with people flooding my systems with garbage content designed to screw with these ratings. And you know they all have the toolbar installed so their zillions of worthless spam websites are being counted.

This problem has parallels elsewhere of course: The Nielsen ratings struggle to account for PVRs. Since you got a TiVo, when was the last time you watched "Live" TV? This is part of why Science Fiction shows struggle on TV... scifi fans are early adopters. So we stopped getting counted and our favorite genres are butchered by networks and lost to the void. PVR users tend to be wealthy (those boxes are expensive) and educated. Now I'm not saying that the dumbing down of TV is exclusively the fault of Tivo, but it sure didn't help that we weren't being counted as excellent "Smart" TV shows get canceled while we keep getting more seasons of Survivor. Who we are and how we live causes us to not be counted, and this has unintended consequences.

So what do we do? I wish I had a good answer to this. My first suggestion would be that if anyone mentions Alexa to you that you freak out and go on a 5-minute rant about how Alexa is stupid and anyone who is using it to seriously make a business decision should be fired. It doesn't actually help, but i estimate that every time I do this, I burn the same number of calories as I might on an elliptical trainer. I assure you the beer gut ain't getting smaller on its own.

Alternatively you could just install the toolbar on every machine you can find and skew the numbers ridiculously towards people that are likely unrepresented. Of course, the conspiracy theorists amongst you will just bitch that I'm trying to fudge Slashdot's own rankings in a system I'm claiming to hate. But that only helps proves my point... the conspiracy theorist is a demographic strongly represented on Slashdot that is unlikely to trust this software. We all ignore a broken status quo "Gold" standard that would fail a 100 level college science class on the grounds of flawed methodology. And this only leads to us not being counted.

Comments

Been complaining for years

[truthsearch]

My first suggestion would be that if anyone mentions Alexa to you that you freak out and go on a 5-minute rant about how Alexa is stupid and anyone who is using it to seriously make a business decision should be fired.

I've been doing this for years. The problem (or actually just what marketers perceive as the problem) is that there is no generic public way to compare web site traffic. The only true way to get traffic metrics is from the web site owners. And they could easily make it up to take in more advertisers. So people in advertising look to Alexa as the only third party source.

The biggest sites don't have as much of a problem because they can work closely with advertising partners. Medium and small sites, however, don't get as much personal attention. So proving themselves as worthy web space for ads is more difficult.

The only people I've heard of that install the Alexa toolbar are web site owners because they want to see their rank often. Ironically so few people have the toolbar installed that they drastically boost their own rank.

We need to convince marketers that Alexa is pointless. But I'm afraid that without a good replace they'll keep using it.

Re:Do it to ourselves, and that's what really hurt

[trolltalk.com]

"It isn't surprising that people who spend money on advertising want to have some metric by which to predict (estimate, guess, what-have-you) the impact of each dollar spent on web advertising."

There are several easy ways:

1. as an advertiser, host the ad on your own server, and just look in your logs ..,
2. as an advertiser, get access to the server's banner administration system for your ad account (postnuke allows this on a per-advertiser basis)
3. as an advertiser, just be skeptical as all hell and don't believe 99% of the stuff you hear - its all BS anyway

If you're so naive as to not insist on hard numbers for actual views (the log files are best , you deserve to get hosed - you can analyse the log files and factor out multiple views per host ip to get the actual number of real views, and reduce fraud; ditto with geolocation of ip addresses to factor out bots in 3rd world countries; ditto for bots that crawl every link on a page; ditto for pages that are loaded then immediately dumped for another page).

As an advertiser, I'd want unique eyeballs - real human eyeballs - that can be verified.

Re:Do it to ourselves, and that's what really hurt

[zarkill]

And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. This is one reason that I actually like Amazon's recommendation system. I can provide information about what I like and don't like, and the site will then suggest items that I may be interested in based on that. If it suggests something that I'm not interested in, I can click "not interested" and it never presents that item to me again.

I would LOVE to have a similar scenario for other ad-driven media. Imagine if I could flag TV commercials with "not interested" and then never see that commercial again, or any commercial for a similar product. Once it got a good feel for what I really like and don't like, I probably wouldn't feel the need to skip commercials. The same could be said of web ads. If I could cherry-pick which ads I was interested in and which I wasn't I might not be so inclined to block ALL of them.

Ads are useful to me sometimes, but picking the signal out of the noise is usually such a hassle that I'd rather just skip the whole process. If everyone could make a very personal statement about what they want to see ads for and what they don't, I think the benefit for both parties would improve.

Spyware yup.

[crabpeople]

Symantec corporate flags the alexa toolbar as spyware, so I couldn't run it if I desired to.

http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup. jsp?docid=2004-062410-3624-99

Re:Asked and answered

[Mandrake]

On larger sites, doing things like collecting / reading web site logs (like your apache log files) is completely unrealistic. We don't even have them turned on here anymore, because they generate so much disk i/o and flood so much disk space (each of our web heads when we last had logging enabled over a year ago produced over 8 gb of apache logs every day - multiply that times 30 and that's a hell of a log parse every single day...) - so we tend to gauge traffic more in megabits per second than anything else.

I am not saying that Alexa is good for looking at traffic trends either - their numbers vary WILDLY from what our actuals are. Oddly enough, Hitwise does a much better job, but I suspect that is a lot of blind luck on their part as I think they take data in a similar fashion.

I'm not sure I had a point, except that web logs aren't really feasible when your traffic crosses a threshold - I'm sure /. has similar logging problems.

Re:*I* figured out why Taco's on a rant!

[metlin]

Oh sure, and YouTube is beating Digg, but that doesn't mean that we'll all move over to YouTube.

No, like another poster said, it is quality over quantity.

If you think some of the arguments on Slashdot are asinine, wait until you read the ridiculous ones on Digg. And give everyone the power to moderate and you have people burying others' comments because they disagree with them.

Add bad grammar, spellings and l33t speak and you have a ridiculous combination of utter rubbish that only a bunch of emo sixteen year-olds can spew forth. Give me Slashdot any day.

At least some you trolls have character. ;-)