Wink Traffic Growth
Last week Wink People Search was covered in the Wall Street Journal. As a result we saw quite an increase in traffic at the Wink site. This was over and above the steady growth in traffic we’ve been seeing since releasing the Wink People Search Engine a few months ago.
We don’t rely much on Alexa numbers, but I decided to go over to Alexa and see how our growth in traffic was being reflected there. I was surprised to see that instead of growth, their chart showed a decline. I have to admit that I was only a little surprised, because I’ve really questioned just how representative of the audience Alexa is.
Here is a chart that overlays the Alexa page view report for Wink with Wink traffic data directly from Google Analytics (which I love). The scales have been matched to show the same starting point a little while before we showed a preview of Wink People Search on stage at the Web 2.0 conference. You can see that the Alexa traffic is flat to negative, while at the same time, the actual traffic has been growing. Some of the most extreme differences occur on our highest traffic days where Alexa shows some of our lowest points.
On March 7, Paul Stamatiou posted on Why You Should Completely Ignore Alexa Stats. It’s a good read.
Alexa is an interesting service, easy to use and tantalizing for comparing sites with one another. However, anyone making decisions based on Alexa data should be careful. They need to think about who the audience is for the site, and whether it is well represented by people who use IE and have downloaded and continued to run the Alexa toolbar. I believe the sample size is not large enough, nor is the audience representative of the larger Web audience.
I guess if Alexa is going to continue to reflect our traffic the way they do, we’ll just have to keep providing a great service and widening that gap!
Cheers
Michael
Tags: peoplesearch, wink.com, Alexa, wink, people search
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