Attention marketers and market researchers! Amazon.com’s Alexa has teamed up with Google technology to deliver amazing free traffic and ranking statistics for all websites at www.alexa.com. By monitoring the site viewing activities of a million or so web surfers who have installed Alexa’s free toolbar in their browser, Alexa tracks traffic, page views and visitors, ranked and over time for every site on the web. Alexa can tell which other sites are linking to a particular site. It also can tell you other similar sites that a particular website’s visitors have viewed. This data is a treasure trove for anyone researching markets, companies, or industries. The traffic data is relative, not absolute, but still quite useful for evaluating a company vis-a-vis its competitors. One thing to note is that the Alexa toolbar only works with Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. So given that Mac users are left out of those whose web movements are being tracked, the Alexa data may not be as representative for Mac product companies.
Relationship of Inbound Links to Site Traffic
One of the outcomes of Google’s rise to dominance as a search engine is that sites that have more inbound links — other sites linking to it — get ranked higher in search results and therefore get more traffic. (You can read more about this at: Search Engine Optimization). But what exactly is the relationship of inbound links to site traffic? I did some quick analysis on a random group of consumer-focused art sites and found the following results.
