Hi Our site is doing around 40k page views a day, and I would like to compare my site with your site through alexa. I'm currently looking at why our "HitWise" ranking is so low, and our alexa rank and stats are flying,

Paul

Alexa isn't really a good measure of traffic since it can only record traffic through browsers that have the alexa toolbar installed. If it happens that you have a higher percentage of traffic from Alexa users than is typical it'll look like you get a lot more traffic than you really do. Alexa has to extrapolate results a lot more than it's reasonable to do.

Alexa as a measure of traffic will be useful for the most popular sites since there's so much traffic that it skews the results less. The less traffic your site gets though the more anything Alexa reports is likely to be off.

Yes good, thanks that's kind of my point, If you have a site that is doing around 40k page views a day (using server based stats), and we compare, and they are equal then we can conclude that enough people have alexa tool bar, at least those visiting ours sites that is, to make the stats mean something.

If they differ incredibly, then people that have alexa come to me and not you.

The thing is with alexa and the theory that one site will get heaps of alexa visitors and the others don;t thus skewing figures I rekon is rubish, as long as you are comparing similar sites, then the likelyhood is that the users will be the same-ish demographic, and similar likelyhood of having an alexa tool bar.

I'm investigating 3rd party metrics and am finding that on a whole they are rubbish particularly the ones you pay a subscription for.

Paul

I believe Alexa is becoming less and less relevant as an accurate tool to asses traffic. There are many ways people are using to fool it...

Alexa is not a very good and accurate tool to determine traffic. It will not also bring you additional traffic.