Believe it or not!

A lot of the advertisers who are interested in advertising on our network of web sites really do pay CLOSE attention to what the Alexa traffic rank is before they committ to advertising. We all know that Alexa rankings are purely based on visitors who have their toolbar installed, yet this metric cannot be ignored.

How can I tell a good Alexa score? What should I look for when purchasing advertising?

btw... I was at alexa the other day and was impressed by what I could learn about my competitors... also was surprised to see screen shots of my better ranking webpages there.

That's a difficult question to answer. Alexa scoring is based on archives at Alexa partner properties mainly the wayback machine, the archiver crawler, and assisted by the alexa toolbar.

It's not a global indication of a website's traffic compared to all websites, and all online users.

It's more of a sampling - how accurate and what error percentage - don't know.

An excellent choice for a forum though!

Check out the thread I started on this a while back, Alexa - a call list!?

This is not entirely true, XP and Windows 2000 users are also counted ,some even if they have turned the "Show Related Links" option off.

Alexa is really a strange beast. It can tell you if a site is unpopular or if it is immensely popular. Since Alexa position can be dramatically affected by who installs the toolbar, it really doesn't provide a very good ranking of sites. I would not make partnering decisions based on the data.

If you do not install the toolbar, you can get some interesting feedback on the popularity of your site. If you install it, and work on your site regularly, the bar will reflect your activity.

For example, SEO Chat has a good rank (1662). That is probably because it attracts web marketers--a group more likely to have the bar installed. A similar forum for Quantum Physics might have the same size readership, but be ranked in the millions.

When I get the Alexa toolbar instaled, my sites go to the top 100.000; if not, they are into the 200.000/300.000 range.

Personally, if I was looking to ascertain whether a website had sufficiently high traffic to be worth advertising on, I would be looking for a 3-month average of 50,000 or above. Even sites in the top 50,000 will vary enormously, but anything outside of this is unlikely to have high levels of traffic...

Aaron

altyfc - I don't believe you can really gauge it that way (don't really know though).

Have one client that averages 7 - 8K uniques a day... their alexa rank is 324,000, while another client with 3K a day and ranked 120,000K.

I have no real clue as to why, other than "market diversity"?

People tend to get hypnotised by numbers. You have more internet marketers with the bar than any other group...so I would suspect the numbers to be heavily skewed.

Alexa gives points for popups...so people who buy popup ads often get higher scores (this bias is dropping a bit with the popup blocker).

Sites with multiple domains score less than a site with a single moster domain they are ranking. Likewise, a site that uses a ~ in the URL chops their traffic into tidbits.

If you are buying 10,000 impressions from someone...it really doesn't matter how high they are in Alexa since 10k impressions is still 10k impressions. Better yet, try to buy click throughs, you can check you stats to see who they are and what they do.

Rules like (a site must have 50k + rank before I consider ads) makes web marketers devise ways to manipulate rank.