The Basic of Alexa

Alexa is one of the most underused resources that are freely available to internet marketers.

Alexa can deliver valuable insights into competitor’s site performance. This type of business intelligence is valuable beyond measure.

For example, let’s hypothetically say that you have the idea to start a new forum for internet marketers. You need to prove that there is room in the current market for you. So, using this example, we are going to click here and head over to Alexa and do a little research.

The top internet marketing forum is the Warrior Forum, which can be found right here.

So if we want to break into this market, this is the site we need to beat. Alexa can tell us whether this is possible or not. Here is the basic info on the Warrior Forum given by Alexa:

This tells us that the Warrior Forum is the 155^th most popular website in the world, the 144^th in America, and that is has 25,273 other websites linking to it (giving it authority).

Looking at these stats, we need to drop our idea of a new internet marketing forum right now; we can’t compete with the Warrior Forum. But what else can Alexa tell us?

Search Traffic

Alexa keeps track of search traffic gained via many search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other second tier search engines. It makes all of this data available free to the public.

Take a look at the screenshot below, this is the basic search data for the Warrior Forum:

This screenshot tells us that the Warrior Forum has some incredible reach. It receives around half a percent of all website traffic in the world. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is a huge amount.

We can also check the other tabs across the top that give information on pageviews, bounce rate and visitor behavior. The power of Alexa does not stop here, we can find out more in depth information about how the Warrior Forum performs in search results.

Search Queries

This is another of the free reports available at Alexa that shows us the actual search queries used by people surfing the web, to find the Warrior Forum:

It shows us the top search queries, and the percentage of overall traffic they provided.

Now, imagine that you are setting up a competing website, here you already have a list of top performing keywords that are already dominated by the Warrior Forum, you can instantly strike these off your keyword list.

But there is more information yet to come!

Search Information

We already know the basic statistics about the Warrior Forum, also how much traffic it receives, and what search terms delivered that traffic.  This is all well and good, but it would be nice to know something about the audience that visits the Warrior Forum.

Well, Alexa can provide this as well; just take a look at this screenshot:

Here we have a full breakdown on audience demographics, including the age, gender, education, and browsing location.

Let’s play a little game here, let’s define the average user of the Warrior Forum. The average user is:

• Over 55 years old
• Has not completed a formal education
• Is male
• Has no children (and is possibly single)
• Is browsing from home

This means that the average Warrior Forum user is a male of 55 or more years old, is not particularly well educated, has no children and is probably single (divorced?) and is not currently employed, as they are browsing from home.

Can you picture this person sitting in their living room reading the forum? You can? Well you just witnessed the power of Alexa; it can deliver true insights into the habits of web users and the sites they visit.

And how did this person arrive at the Warrior Forum? And where did they go afterwards? Alexa can tell us this also!

The Click Stream

Alexa also keeps track of all of the sites that referred visitors to the Warrior Forum, and all of the sites they visited afterwards by clicking a link somewhere on the Warrior Forum, and this is called the Click Stream, it looks like this:

We can see that most people arrived from Warrior Plus  and this is not really surprising, this is a helper site that makes certain features of the Warrior Forum easier to navigate. We can also see that many came from Google and Facebook.

When it comes to exit sites, we can see something very interesting here. 1.65% of visitors clicked a PayPal link to leave the forum. These people almost certainly clicked on a “Buy Now” button in the Warrior Special Offers (WSO) section.

As the 155^th most popular site in the world, the Warrior Forum receives millions of visitors a day and 1.65% of those visitors are buying something. This must add up to an awful lot of cash!

Again, something we have learned just by checking our Alexa.

In Conclusion

This article has demonstrated how a little creative thinking can extract incredible business insights about websites, from the amazing depth of information that Alexa makes freely available to the public.

If you have not been using Alexa to judge your competition, and learn about your target audience, you should start right now.

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