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Are Analytics Sites Like Alexa A Viable Measure For Web Traffic?

There are quite a few services like Alexa, including Compete, Nielsen Online, Comscore, SimilarWeb and various google tools.

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Are Analytics Sites Like Alexa A Viable Measure For Web Traffic?
Photo: Bart Burggraaf

No they are not. It will give you some notion of the popularity of a site but time and time again people looking at this have found that the data is directionally and discretely wrong.

There are quite a few services like Alexa, including Compete, Nielsen Online, Comscore, Hitwise, Quantcast, SimilarWeb and various google tools – all are useful in some way but not to take at face value, traffic wise due to various reasons.

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The reason a site like Alexa is not accurate is because they rely on the usage of toolbars that collect traffic data, but the audience that use them is notoriously unrepresentative of the population at large.

The only way to get really accurate data is to get access to web analytics numbers somehow. In the absence of this, Nielsen Online and Comscore data is useful, but expensive (and they certainly also have their own limitations).

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MediaGroup Worldwide
www.mediagroupww.com/
Bart Burggraaf is Partner at MediaGroup Worldwide, an international financial marketing agency group.Prior to this, he managed global marketing at Citibank’s Margin FX product CitiFX Pro and oversaw the growth of the retail business. Before his time at Citi, he worked at the Copenhagen based online trading company Saxo Bank where he worked on online marketing in the global marketing group. Previous experience includes running a digital marketing agency in the Netherlands and working for a Spain based property developer.Bart holds a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of Amsterdam and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and a guest lecturer at various business schools.