It's good to share

As the father of a toddler, I'm constantly reminding my little one how important it is to share. For good reason, too, sharing is a good thing. That's why we've made it easy to share Alexa Traffic Details with your friends, family, and the world. In the lower right hand corner of each Traffic Stats graph there are the words "Share this:" followed by two little icons (see the included image). The first icon allows you to share the page with your friends on Facebook, while the other to tweets it to your followers on Twitter. Sharing is good, and now sharing Alexa Traffic Details is easy, too.

Easier to find international rankings.

The ease with which you can find how websites are ranked by country has just gotten easier.



Let's first take a step back, though. Did you know that in addition to the global Alexa Traffic Rank, we rank websites by country as well? Okay, you probably did. The Top Sites by Country lists have been available for quite some time, and the Alexa Traffic Detail pages display the Alexa Traffic Rank broken down by country. For example, Google currently has a global Alexa Traffic Rank of #1, but is ranked #3 in Turkey and #11 in Japan. The Alexa Traffic Detail pages also give estimates for how the users of websites are distributed by country. In the example of Google, not quite 40% of people who visit Google are in the US, while almost 10% are in India, etc.



If you click around and look at the Traffic Detail pages for various website and pay attention to the distributions of users by country, it should come as little or no surprise just how international many sites are. After all, there are people all over the world surfing the web, right now. At Alexa we realize that that webmasters in countries like China, Turkey, and Germany, for example, might not care how well their website is doing in the USA or even globally, and we try to support all webmasters and enthusiasts regardless of where they are located or where their visitors are from.

To help make it easier to quickly tell which country a site is most popular in, we have added the traffic rank in the country where the site has the most visitors to the top of the Traffic Detail pages, next to the global Alexa Traffic Rank. For example, Google has an Alexa Traffic Rank of #1 and a Traffic Rank in US of #1. On the other hand, the popular Chinese search engine Baidu (shown in the graphics) has a global Alexa Traffic Rank of #9, but is the #1 site in China. This data isn't new, of course. As discussed above it has been available on the Traffic Detail pages for some time. What is new is a quick and easy to to see how a site is ranked globally as well as in the country where most of its users are.

Alexa 101: The Anatomy of the Traffic Rank Graph

This is the first in a series of blog postings dissecting the Alexa site information pages. In this posting we take a detailed look at the "Traffic Stats" tab in the center of the page. This is a great place to start when trying to understand the traffic visiting a website, how that traffic is trending over time, and how it compares with competing sites. You can follow along by visiting the site info page for your favorite site, for example #1-ranked Google

The Alexa traffic rank is calculated using a combination of average daily reach and pageviews. What is "reach"? We'll have more to say about this in an upcoming post, but basically it measures how many people are visiting a site, expressed as a fraction of the global Internet population. For example, if you click on the "Reach" link below the "Traffic Stats" tab, you can see that Google's reach is currently around 33%, meaning that about one in three Internet users visit google.com on a typical day.

As the site with the highest combination of reach and pageviews, Google is currently ranked #1. The site with the second highest combination is #2, the next is #3, and so on. The best way to improve your Alexa traffic rank, that is to get a rank that is a smaller number than you have now, is to attract more visitors to your site and keep them engaged (and clicking) on more pages. Note that reach is weighted more heavily than pageviews in the combination, so other things being equal, the former (adding visitors) counts for more than the latter (adding pageviews per user).

The main Alexa traffic rank (as displayed in the Alexa toolbar) is a three-month rolling average, while the points in the Traffic Stats rank graph are daily. While the daily Alexa Traffic Ranks allow you to see fluctuations in a site's traffic on a very short timescale, the longer-term averages listed on the site information pages (and used for our Top Sites lists) are much more robust and authoritative for sites with low traffic. Note that ranks above about 100,000 should be taken with a healthy grain of salt and are not displayed on our graphs.


When looking at a Traffic Rank graph, what are some if the things you see? For some sites the first thing you might notice is an approximate 7-day periodicity in the data. This is because the "weekend web" is a little different than the weekday web, and some sites are less popular (or more popular) destinations on the weekend. You can clearly see this effect in the traffic graph for LinkedIn, the popular networking site for professionals.



Another feature you can see in traffic rank graphs is how a website's rank is trending over time. The three-month average is just that, a rank based on the accumulated reach and pageviews over the course of three months. Facebook, for example, recently moved ahead of YouTube and into the number three position. But this reversal happened a while ago in both the daily traffic rank estimates and in the one-month traffic rank. We can also see that Facebook is continuing to grow, and it could soon overtake #2 Yahoo (which until 2009 had long been #1).

What is all this good for? Well, at some level it is fun and interesting. The fact that Facebook is on any given day globally the 3rd most popular destination in the world says a lot about what people are using the web for. This pattern is not limited to just Facebook, either, but other community sites such as Wikipedia, Blogger, and Twitter, all all trending upward as well. People are using the web to connect with each other, and while this is not a new revelation it certainly is apparent in the data.

This analysis doesn't have to be limited to social networks or top sites, either. If you own a website, you can use Traffic Rank to compare your site to those of your competitors. Does the competition have a better (lower) rank than you? If so, you can start asking yourself why they are getting more visitors and/or pageviews, and what you can do to improve your rank in relation to theirs. Be careful, though. Even if your Alexa Traffic Rank is better than your competitors, that does not necessarily mean you are getting more of the quality traffic you want. For that you need to delve further into the Traffic Stats graph, which we will do in the next installment of this series.