Collective Thoughts

Why Are Alexa Double-Dipping Social Media Penalties?

Earlier this year Alexa shook things up a little, applying some kind of penalty or reduced modifier to websites with a traditionally higher percentage of Alexa toolbar users than average, predominately technology and webmaster focused sites who found the Alexa data useful, or who actively evangelised Alexa toolbar use as it is often a major factor in gauging traffic for advertising.
Some of the 3rd party tools offering Alexa data also provide other useful features, especially for webmasters with toolbars such as Search Status for Firefox.

Some level of rebalance was probably fair, to try to address the concerns of sites with high traffic but with a much lower frequency of Alexa toolbar users, who often felt they were at a disadvantage, especially in advertising sales.

During the last month Alexa has introduced another round of filtering or penalties, reducing or wiping out the effect of traffic from Social Media and Social News sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon, but potentially other sites such as Twitter or popular feed readers.
I haven’t done enough granular research to come up with a final list of likely candidates.

This is something potentially valuable to advertisers, as huge traffic spikes are possible from the largest social sites that can lead to an imbalance in their trend data, especially for the most recent 3 month period that appears in their toolbar by default.

I actually welcome this change, although I would much prefer to have both sets of data available, thus allowing Alexa to also provide a 3rd, possibly unique measure of the most “socially influenced” sites.

Unfortunately they seem to have made an error in their calculations, reported by both Performancing and more recently Daily Blog Tips (lots of head to head comparrisons), which is interesting to explore in more detail.

Double Dipping Penalties

If there was a 75% penalty for webmasters, or their toolbar multiplication factor was 75% less you currently have something like this:-

Traffic=((Toolbar*10)/4)-SM

Say there were 60 visitors to a site using the toolbar (maybe from 500 -1000 total visitors), and 100 visitors were from social media (10-20%)

((60*10)/4)-100 = 50 visitors being counted

Note: It would only take 25% of traffic to come from social media for the resulting traffic to equal to zero

What it should be is something more like:-

Traffic=((Toolbar*10)-SM)/3

/3 rather than 4 because webmasters might more frequent social media users as well, though penetration of both toolbars might be even higher.

((60 *10)-100)/4 = 125 visitors being counted

These are only examples of how the math might work and are not real world figures – I am sure Alexa are using much more complex calculations, but I am equally sure they are making some serious mistakes that can make a site receiving 500+ unique visitors per day appear to have way less than 100, or a site receiving 10,000 appear to have the equivalent of 1000 visitors or less.
This is something that affects all sites, but disproportionately affects sites (technology and webmaster) with a higher percentage of Alexa toolbar users, that had them rebalanced earlier this year.

Here are some examples of popular webmaster related sites that this double-dipping penalty have had a drastic effect on

Shoemoney.com currently with a 1 week average of over 174K
Doshdosh.com currently with a 1 week average of over 200K
ReadWriteWeb for 5th August one day stats was an Alexa rating of 90,000
Search Engine Land for 5th August one day stats was 83,000 with a one week average of 86K

The double-dipping penalty also hasn’t left the social sites themselves unscathed, with Digg and Reddit for some strange reason showing noticable declines, but Mixx continuing to gain. Maybe internal referrals from subdomains offer a benefit.

Then there is Tech industry favorite Techmeme, which is quite capable of sending 1000s of visitors to other sites on a daily basis, real referral traffic, but for some reason has a weekly average of 137,000 itself.

Daniel on DBT went into a lot more examples as mentioned earlier, including comparing traffic where he knows the real stats.

It is hard to tell how this might have affected larger sites, as relative traffic levels might be looked on as seasonal averages, and a drop from 2K Alexa to 4K Alexa might be just par for the course.

So far there is no official mention of any changes on the Alexa blog.

Whether my equation is correct doesn’t actually matter, it is clear that many sites (but not all) within the technology and webmaster niches were hit.
The most infuriating part isn’t the penalties and calculation mistakes themselves, however they are done, but how Alexa, owned by Amazon, could make such as huge and obvious mistake.

Could this be deliberate, and if so why?

Posted in Rants | 9 Comments »

Quality; the ultimate marketing tool

If you’re selling crap, if your website sucks or your customer service is non-existent, then you are likely making your marketing efforts much harder than need be. This is never more true than when talking about social media marketing. If you’d be so kind, allow me to elaborate.

Recently the masochists here at Collective Thoughts tasked me with writing the odd tidbit of social goodiness I was certainly bemused at the prospect of doing so. You see, in the end analysis I am a business consultant that almost exclusively moves from the mindset of what is best for the SMB (small to medium sized business) – which is not always to favour Social Media Marketing. Actually, for some time there was every reason to question where it fits inside the marketing toolbox at all when success already existed without it.

(inspired by Web Pages that Suck!)

And what is the secret to social media marketing success anyways? That will all depend on what you’re looking to get out of it. Some common benefits include;

1. Branding and brand management
2. Customer service/relations
3. SEO implications (rankings/SERP management)
4. Sales (advertising, product or service)
5. Leads (primary and secondary)
6. Qualitative market research

While in most cases you will have multiple goals and benchmarks for measuring success, there is one simple concept that you should consider to ultimately ease the strain on your marketing load; quality.

The quality connection

Ultimately with any type of offering one of the primary factors that truly needs addressing is quality. Your efforts in marketing will always be best served and budgets eased by putting the effort into quality control throughout the business lifecycle. Should future plans include strong web support from SEO, SMM or even Branding and Qualitative Research aspects, quality is your friend and can do much of the work for you. You should put an effort into each aspect as this will ultimately help you maximize your marketing efforts.

Some examples include;

1. Quality products and services
2. Quality information/resources
3. Quality conversations and interactions
4. Quality presentation (website and packaging)
5. Quality content (websites/blogs)
6. Quality infrastructure and usability (online and off)

By making all efforts possible in attaining the highest possible levels of quality, your efforts in not only social media marketing, but all areas of your marketing plan shall be eased. It is no longer the world of hard sell and the viral wonderment of cumulative efforts shall bear its sweetest fruit.

Do your self a favour and don’t be swayed into thinking that shortcomings in your approach can be made up with marketing budgets. While reach can be improved, ultimately the social world fumbling could do more harm than good to your cause.

Understanding the value of quality we can also look to the actual traffic generated from your SMM campaigns.

Quality traffic over quantity

No matter what the goals of your SMM campaign may be, targeted traffic will always be the call of the day. By running generalized campaigns one ultimately attracts generalized traffic which is usually not effective in the end analysis.

• Would you rather have a momentous wave of mindless Diggers or lesser set of targeted TechCrunchers for that latest service offering?
• Would you rather a sea of Stumblers or a trickle from Kaboodle with that new camera line your pimping?
• How about market influencers?

A single positive experience from a market influencer can be worth more than a Digg and Stumble rush combined. It is often the quality of the visitors that we desire over sheer numbers.

One must certainly try and decide early on what your goals, qualifiers and associated values will be for a social media marketing campaign as mere mass of traffic to the website is usually not going to get the job done. In most cases you should be more focussed on the qualities of the visitors generated. Are they your target market? How can they further your course to the ultimate goals of the campaign? Is the traffic generation method sustainable?

Once more, quality is an important aspect that must be considered.

Word of mouth travels at the speed of sound

And so, you should at all times remember that one’s efforts from the goal setting, systems and planning to the development and analysis processes; quality is a word to respect. You should not cut corners nor try and fool a wary public into believing you are more than you are. This attention to quality will surely be noted in the greater sphere and pay the ultimate dividends to be reaped from a successfully social media marketing campaign and beyond.

The next time you hear ‘quality over quantity’ remember to look in the metaphorical mirror to ensure your mindset seeks out the qualities of success.

Posted in Rants | 2 Comments »