Dropping Alexa...

One of the things we initially used for this project was Alexa. When i-iter started, almost a year ago, we could not use proper stats as we did not control our own server, as we do now. So there wasn't much we could do to track traffic, apart from using Google and Alexa. So I was happy to install the Alexa bar on my Firefox and proudly show what appeared to be a massive traffic. In a few months we jumped up to the top 100k positions.

A few months ago we moved to a new server, were we have proper stats. In the meantime I removed Alexa from my own firefox. The result is a bit shoking: while real traffic from our Apache logs is slowly and steadily growing (just as one would expect to happen with a start-up project) my removing the Alexa thingy from my OWN computer buried us down to a 2 millionth position... which means but one thing: of all the users and visitors we have, I was the one and only using Alexa...

Morals: you simply cannot make comparisons based on it. Especially if you and your public are europeans, since nobody even knows Alexa exists, in our surroundings... wanna know stuff about your traffic? Control your server and mount an absolutely standard AWSTAT. It's for free, it doesn't clutter your browser and it WORKS :) One more lesson I learned :)