Shaw & Todd - Advertising and Marketing Communications

As a marketing professional, I couldn’t be more thrilled at the abundance of metrics and analytics that the Internet makes available. Here’s a confession: I’ve always been addicted to statistics. Guess that’s what happens when one is exposed to the Baseball Encyclopedia at the age of six. So now I have a new outlet: website traffic tracking sites. There are bunch of them out there– perhaps the best known (and the one I most often use) is Alexa. A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Alexa basically lets you view any site’s traffic statistics, ranking, and perhaps best of all, provides you with the ability to compare the traffic results of multiple sites. It also gives you comprehensive lists of the top sites in multiple categories. Check out the top 500 visited sites or drill down to an area as specific as the most popular online scientific publications. Some doubt the absolute reliability of these results, which is definitely a caveat, but for the pure volume of analytical data that it delivers, Alexa is truly a fountain of information. Actually, more like an ocean.