New Alexa Features: Demographics, Clickstream, Search Traffic
Since their redesign Alexa.com has added even more goodies to the mix. Last week they announced search term info and this week three new features were released: Demographics, Clickstream and Search Traffic.
The search term addition, now allows you to see the search terms that have been driving traffic to a site over the last month. With this addition you can see the list of terms for virtually any site, in sorted order, and quickly see which ones are driving traffic to a site.
To see this new data, just go to an Alexa Site Info page for any site, and click on the “Keywords” tab. This tool is great to do some competitor research as are the three new tools released today, which include: Demographics, Clickstream and Search Traffic.
Here is the skinny on them:
Demographics: provides a demographic breakdown for virtually any site, including gender, age, education and more. It can be used to look at your competitors and decide if you have an opportunity to grow your audience into new demographics or ones you have been missing.
Clickstream: shows the sites visitors were on before and after any site. Two types of data will be shown: Upstream sites, are the sites a visitor was before coming to your domain and downstream sites, are the sites which a visitors went to after leaving it.
Search Traffic: shows how much traffic a site gets from search engines.
Now comes the caveat of using Alexa or any such site. The data is based on a subset of users with the installed Alexa Toolbar and “data collected from other diverse sources” . What those sources are is never disclosed. Nevertheless, having some data is better than no data. We just want to remind you to take it with a grain of salt. Poor Alexa Rank does not mean you have a bad site, it means that there are not a lot of Alexa Toolbar users visiting your site. In our view, once Alexa finally decides to come out with a web-based toolbar, like StumbleUpon, the data quality will increase dramatically. Most user do not have room or the interest in adding another toolbar to their browser. What do you think? Do you like the new Alexa?
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The Alexa redesign shows a site is never too old for innovation. The question is has it come too late after they have been passed by the likes of Quantcast? Personally I also like the idea of the web toolbar, as long as it’s not like the DiggBar :p
These new SEO tools from Alexa certainly can help site-owners to start rethinking process on how effective their website is. And tools like these can function as a checkpoint for people who depend on the knowledge of SEO companies to get their website optimized. The tolls are easy accesible and so can give a hold to see whether a SEO job was done properly. I’m unhappy to say but I’ve seen some examples of not so good SEO consultanst out there.
Testing the tools on the site showed that Alexa only makes dates visible when a websites has about 1 million visitors and up. So it seems not interesting for other companies than the very big ones. Further it has not been made clear how the demographic dates are being collected. So one cannot really rely on them
A more principal point is this: with the overwhelming growth of websites over the last years and the price-fall of building and hosting websites, I recently started discussing how long page-ranking and SEO tools will be effective to bring consumers, customers, well, people in general, to the websites and content they’re interested in. In the social media revolution an important new goal for companies and marketeers is to find out how customers can reach them, paralell to the old way of thinking: how do I reach my customers.
I slowly see a trend become visible that people start to look for other ways to get the (not sponsored) content they are interested in than by typing in a few words in a search engine. Most people have little knowledge about search-methods and are not finding what they’re looking for. I do foresee that someday in the coming three to five years the information overload will come to a break-even-point. Everybody in the communication business, old media, new media, print, digital etc. should be prepared for that.
So it seems to be time for the most innovative and creative people in the marketing and SEO business, on agency and customer side, young and old, to start breeding on new ways and methods of chanelling messages back and forth. I’m interested in people who want to breed on this topic with me !
J. van der Steen, you make some good points. I have covered the downside of using Alexa as well. Nevertheless, for those seeking to get a take on their larger competitors (with low Alexa scores), one can learn a lot. I think Quantcast is much better than Alexa, but once again the closed nature of the sources and limited user base, make all these services hard to trust. There is definitely a hole in this area of the web and it should be interesting to see what comes forward in the future. If anything, if Google would open some of the stats from analytics to the public, we would get a much better picture. Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen,
Clickstream function is also good to analize your compititors.I really appreciate new alexa tool.
Good article. FYI The new feature of Alexa clickstream is BS! Highly inaccurate and totally bogus information. Don’t count on it being anywhere near accurate. And NEVER ask for any kind of support, because you won’t get it. Try to find an email for support or questions. What is interesting is that Alexa clickstream tells me that 100% of my downstream clicks end up at one single competitor’s web site, Like no one EVER leaves to go to Google, a search engine, or any other site. EVERY SINGLE VISITOR exits my site to go to a competitor’s site? Yea right, unlikely. Here is what is MORE likely, and that is that the other (HUGE) site paid off Alexa to show up as the only donwstream click. How many other sites out there have the same thing happening to them? I bet there are quite a few. Alexa need to get with the program and hire a few good developers who actually know there stuff. Use analytics for a real picture – far more accurate and no “spware” Alexa toolbar to download that watches your every move on the internet.
I don’t think the info is BS, as you say. I think you have to keep in mind that the Alexa Data is from users of the Alexa Toolbar. So of course it can be skewed. Only the sites with a rank of 1000 and less are accurate. Regardless, Alexa gives you some interesting info to review.
Just one question regarding the Clickstream. Do you think, that the upstream is defined “shows the sites visitors were on before and after any site” or “shows the sites visitors have clicked in before anys and after any site”
Writing that, that “click definition” would be only good for upstream traffic not downstream…
But then.. the upstream data would have to be normalized by the percentage of people that have google as a startpage… wouldnt it?
Per Alexa: shows the sites visitors were on before and after any site before yours.
See full details:
http://blog.alexa.com/2009/04/more-new-alexa-features-demographics.html