All Entries Tagged With: "Alexa"

What is Alexa?

Alexa Internet Inc. is a company that specializes in providing statistical information on how much traffic websites receive. Based in California, Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa offers a free toolbar that is downloaded and installed into the major browsers–Internet Explorer, Mozilla/FireFox and Netscape.

This toolbar is a tracking program that records the URL’s of all websites visited from that particular browser and transmits this information to Alexa, where it is then used to compute a ranking for each recorded site. This is known as a site’s “Alexa Rank”.

Why is a site’s Alexa rank important?
Forecasting the response rate to an ad on a particular website requires knowing how much traffic the site receives. In theory, Alexa’s rank does just that. It provides a statistical ‘best guess’ based on information from actual web surfers. Some pay-per-click networks offer Alexa’s information as a resource for assessing the relative strength of various websites in terms of traffic received.