Beside than just being a place to spend your time socializing online, businesses can use social media sites to research competition, their employees, and their customers. There are many different shortcuts people can use to see how effective someone's social presence is, how much blog traffic they get, and how "influential" they might just be on social media.
If your competitor has a website, they will be working hard to bring visitors there. When it comes to website monitoring, Alexa's ranking system comes in. Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon and provides traffic data, global rankings, and other information on thousands of websites.
Alexa also chronicles the history of the web through The Wayback Machine, where people can see visual snapshots of almost every website since its inception on the web.
Sites are ranked on tracking information from users of the Alexa browser toolbar (or the Alexa Chrome extension). The data is aggregated based on the last three months' of browsing behavior. For a small to medium-sized business site, you will see the following data (the most visited sites reflect more data):
Global rank: Ranking based on page views and visitors from the entire world during the last three months.
Rank in headquartered country: Ranking based on page views and visitors from the website's home country during the last three months. The rank is shown when Alexa has sufficient regarding the website.
Reputation: Number of sites that linked the visitor to the site (updated monthly).
Traffic stats: Unless the site is in the top one hundred thousand, you will not see stats. The stats for those sites appear on the chart, is available to compare with your competitors.
Search analytics: The search terms people used to get to this site.
Audience demographics: How the site's visitors compare to the demographics of the general internet population.
Alexa ranking is important for websites that want to earn money, and If you want to get advertisers on your site that something that advertising groups look at. The Alexa metrics show potential connections that you are serious about your site and authority in your industry.
Regularly compare your website to your competition's websites, noting who they are reaching and the keywords that drove people to their sites.
If a website is registered with Alexa, it will have verified metrics that will show the actual number of unique visitors per month that the it gets. Most people don’t verify their site.
There are pros and cons to Alexa ranking. Most people consider it valuable only for direct advertising. Given the fact that Alexa ranking for a site is calculated on the basis of how many visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited that particular site, the results can be inaccurate most of the time. Many websites on Alexa are either overestimated or underestimated.
Although Alexa have less in accuracy, its rank is still considered important because there are lots of customers and advertisers who take Alexa rankings seriously.