- Demographics - provides a demographic breakdown for virtually any site, including gender, age, education and more
- Clickstream - shows the sites visitors were on before and after any site
- Search Traffic - shows how much traffic a site gets from search engines
We have heard from media planners and ad-buyers that demographic data can be useful when planning a campaign to make sure your ad campaign hits your target audience. It can also be useful when looking at your competitors to help you decide if you have an opportunity to grow your audience by expanding into a new demographic. Looking at the demographic data to the left, you'll notice that Oprah.com skews toward Females, Ages 45-54, with a college education, browsing from home . That sounds about right. You can get this type of information for just about any site on the Web, even sites where the demographics might not be so obvious, like yelp.com for example.Next up, let's take a look at the clickstream for careerbuilder.com:
The Clickstream feature contains two separate sections, Upstream Sites, which shows where visitors were before coming to careerbuilder.com, and Downstream Sites, which shows where visitors went after leaving CareerBuilder. The list of upstream sites can be a great way to identify affiliate relationships or significant advertising placements. You can see here that CareerBuilder has an unusually large percent of traffic coming from MSN. With a little digging you'll find that this is due to a partnership between MSN and CareerBuilder.Downstream sites shows where visitors went after leaving CareerBuilder. This type of information can be very valuable to product managers identify why people are leaving their site. In CareerBuilder's case, you'll see that people are going to cbsalary.com, presumably to look at salaries in their region, and going to Facebook. In this case, CareerBuilder may want to build in a salary lookup feature and some social networking features if they want to keep these people from leaving.
Last but not least, we have a new feature called Search Traffic, which shows how much traffic a site historically gets from search engines. Let's take a look at how Yelp.com compares with Yellowpages.com.
Search Traffic, is in essence, a measure of how well a site is optimized for search engines. Case in point, you can see here on the graph to the left that Yelp.com (in blue) is well optimized and gets approximately 50% of their traffic from search engines. Comparing Yelp to Yellow Pages.com (in red) you will see that Yellowpages.com has an opportunity to grow their visits significantly if they can improve their search traffic to match Yelp.I hope that you find these new features helpful as you continue to grow your web businesses. If you have a success story that you would like us to share, or if you have discovered a novel use for one of our features, let me know. We continuing to build out Alexa in response to the comments and feedback that we receive, so don't be shy. The best way to get in touch with us is commenting in the blog, or shooting us a quick e-mail via this link.
