As an online marketer, it is often the case that a website will propose an advertising opportunity and then haggle a bit over the price. So how do you know exactly what to pay for a particular opportunity? Specifically, how do you determine the relative traffic to the website, and what the character of that traffic is?

One online tool that can be useful in just such a case is Alexa - the Web Information Company at www.alexa.com.

Alexa is very easy to use. One simply navigates to the website and then uses the input box to make a website query. The results are returned with a correpsonding ''Alexa Traffic Rank'' - this is a number from 1 to 1,000,000+ that gives an indication of the relative popularity of a particular website. The lower the number, the more popular a site is. As of the writing of this article, Yahoo is ranked 1 at Alexa, followed by Google at 2 and YouTube at 3.

Here are the rankings of some other sites to give you a sense of rankings:

dedicated servers hosting company, HostMySite.com has an Alexa rank of 32,041

online auction site, eBay, has an Alexa rank of 21

political satire site, jibjab.com, currently has an Alexa rank of 4,127

In addition to the traffic ranking numbers, one can also get a feel for the character of the traffic to the site, by viewing where else that traffic is likely to visit. So for example, if you use Alexa to view the website for American Airline, aa.com - and select the ''Related Links'' tab on the left nav bar - you will see that other likely destinations for this traffic are:

US Airways
Southwest.com
Nothwest Airlines
and Delta.com

So obviously this website attracts folks looking for airline travel. By using the related links feature, a marketer can get a good idea of what the visitors to a particular site are interested in - and whether that traffic will fit well with the advertising campaign. All of this can be done independently of the salesperson from that website.

So be sure to try out the Alexa website the next time you are faced with an advertising decision, and need to get some comparative data on a website that you are not very familiar with.

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Published on: 2008-01-16 (1017 reads)