This post continues on with the question posed two posts earlier, “Does the Alexa ranking influence the amount of comments that a blog will receive?” or “Does the ranking help make a successful blog?”

As you may or may not know, Alexa rankings are like golf scores. A lower number is better, indicating rank among approximately the top 10 million blogs or websites.

Let’s look at the data.

The Results of My Tedious Work

Having done many of these analyses at work, and as can be plainly seen in the table from Part 2 (which is reposted here for your convenience), I can tell you that there appears to be little correlation between traffic rank and either the total number of comments or even the average number of comments per post.

For example, econtalk.org has an Alexa of 847,199 with 42 comments and averages 21 comments per post. This rank is not particularly high as things go in the blogosphere. So, let’s pick a blog with a much higher Alexa on which I could expect more comments. Psfk.com has an Alexa of 72,817 with 123 comments BUT, Psfk.com has 99 posts for the period studied whereas econtalk.org had only 2 posts. More posts, more comments. That’s a reasonable rule. So, here the answer to the question doesn’t seem to be yes.

I could go on like this, picking out various combinations. Certainly you may pick your own combinations to study. But what really matters is how the whole sample relates to itself. In order for the answer to my question to be yes, there must be an internal consistency within the sample. Finding that internal consistency is where that handy little tool, the coefficient of correlation, comes in.

I ran correlation coefficients for the following combinations of number sets.

1. Alexa Rank to Number of Comments

2. Alexa Rank to Average Number of Comments per Post

And what did I find? Well, let’s say I think you can say the answer to my question is no.

For those readers who know something about correlation coefficients, you can see that the above pretty much means that there is no relationship between the sets of numbers measured.

For those readers with no knowledge of correlation coefficients, please let me give a short explanation. A correlation coefficient can range from -1.0 to +1.0. This statistic measures the change relationship between two number sets, or factors. The sign indicates the direction of the change, while the number indicates the strength of the change.

So, a positive sign means that an increase in one factor will cause an increase in the other factor. While a negative sign means that an increase in one factor will cause a decrease in the other factor. The number represents a percentage, think of the 1 as 100%, showing how much change in the relationship there is.

Generally speaking, and there are of course exceptions, unless a correlation coefficient is over +0.70 or under -0.70, it is regarded as statistically meaningless, or that there is no relationship between the two factors.

So our coefficients show that, for our sample, there is no relationship between the traffic level and the number of comments or the average number of comments per post.

What This Means

Since there is no relationship between the Alexa ranking and the Number of Comments or the Average Comments per Post, I can say to those analysts studying their competitor’s blogs that Alexa is not going to help you assess your competitor’s level of blog success, as I defined it in Part 1 of this post series.

Conclusion

So for you, as a competitive intelligence manager, if you’re using Alexa even as a cursory measure of whether a blog is successful for your competitor, you might like to try looking at a different measure. I know I am.

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So continuing from my last post, the central question posed earlier is, “Does the Alexa ranking influence the amount of comments that a blog will receive?”

The Calculation

Connections such as this can be determined statistically. There’s a little tool in statistics called a “coefficient of correlation.” What this handy little tool does is tell us if there is a statistically valid connection between two or more sets of numbers. In business things that are statistically valid are generally accepted as gospel, so naturally I thought this would be the best approach.

Embarking on a project such as this can be somewhat formidable. After all, at the time of this writing Technorati, the blog tracking system, is tracking over 113 million blogs. That’s a lot of blog territory and even more comments to cover. I can’t even reasonably imagine how many comments are attached to all those blogs. Nor is there any research I consider to be reliable that tells us how many blog comments are out there. So let’s just say there are a billion comments out there.

I can’t correlate the traffic of 113 million blogs to a billion comments. The task is just too onerous. So I took a sample instead. In market research picking a sample size is always a problem. But I did it carefully and with attention to market research rules.

Being that our focus is on business blogging, my sample consisted of 20 blogs in business related fields such as finance, investing, the economy, and general business. I even threw in a few of the top corporate blogs.

Picked at random from within the above business categories, I made sure that I got blogs with both a high and low Alexa ranking. By picking blogs with high and low rankings I raised my chances of being able to answer my question. Then the tedious work began.

I noted each blog’s Alexa ranking, and then I counted all the posts and comments for a two-week period prior to my research, which I performed back on April 2nd and April 3^rd of 2008. The results are shown in the table below.

So what does all this mean?

Well, if you know correlation analysis you can crunch the numbers yourself. Or you can simply return for my next post where I’ll explain the meaning of the above data.

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The Question Determined

Not too long ago, I was reading an article on SEOmoz.com about Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence. The ideas in this article presented an interesting take on whether or not the external metrics of publicly available traffic data, like Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines, Google Page Rank, etc. correlate to actual traffic statistics (internal metrics). The author’s conclusion was that there was no correlation between external metrics and internal metrics. In other words, the author found that the rankings of these external metrics did not indicate the true level of traffic for any particular site. Too bad. Competitive intelligence would have been made oh so much more easily pursued had that relationship been proven. Maybe even a little too easy.

But that article posed a question in my mind. Here’s my background thinking for that question.

I know that a great many web surfers, blog readers in particular, while viewing a site will check the Alexa ranking for that particular site. Alexa is one of the most popular of all the publicly available external metrics for websites.

It’s always fun to “check the Alexa.” Count me among those that do. I’ve got the Alexa toolbar in the lower right corner of my browser, so Alexa checks are pretty much instantaneous. After reading the aforementioned article, a question popped into my mind which was “Does the Alexa ranking influence the amount of comments that a blog will receive?” Here’s why that’s a valid question.

Based on the theories of crowd behavior and social proof, I theorized that if a blog reader believes a blog to be well-trafficked, regardless of the findings of the previously mentioned article, then the reader might feel that the blog has some importance and therefore, to be seen as part of that importance, the reader will leave a comment. And since Alexa is one of the most common publicly available external metrics, I decided to limit my question to just Alexa.

For competitive intelligence on blogs, I thought the answer to this question might be useful theory for the determination of the success of a competitor’s blog. But before I go on to talk about whether or not using Alexa as a gross indicator of comment level is valid, let me first chat about the idea of “success.”

Success Defined

Success can mean many things to many people. But no matter what defines success it cannot be reached unless a goal is established. If there is no goal, there is nothing by which to measure the success.

In recent years, blogging has become one of the more popular social media tools used in business marketing. In my research I have seen many businesses jump into blog marketing without giving much thought to what they wanted to achieve with the blog.

Generally, businesses seem to have a vague idea that since blogs are part of the social media arsenal, blogs can help them to get “social” with their customers and prospects, or even your customers and prospects. “Social” is taken to mean establishing some sort of “personal” relationship between the blogging company and the customers in the marketplace. This is good because one of the primary rules of keeping customers is to have an established relationship with them. Blogs fit perfectly in this plan because:

The primary goal of a blog is:

• Establishing a dialogue between writer and readers.

Since a blog is a two-way, interactive communications medium, businesses, i.e, your competitors, can use blogs to get a conversation going between themselves and those that they serve, i.e., your customers.

So a successful blog can be defined as the creation of dialogue, which is dependent upon the level of comments.

Perhaps you, as a competitive intelligence manager, may be thinking, “Wait a minute. I thought the primary goal of a business blog was to bring in new business?” The answer is no. Bringing in new business is a strategic goal, reached by attaining many different tactical goals. A blog is a tactic within the overall business strategy. Reaching the tactical goal will help reach the strategic goal.

A competitor’s blog simply assists in the all-important marketing process of establishing a link between the competitor and the customer. Without such a link a competitor, any competitor, is doomed to failure. But for those that can establish this link, their customer-centrism will pay off.

In talking to business bloggers, and reading their comments on other blogs, I find that many think that if a blog has a good Alexa, Google Page Rank, Technorati score, or ranks high on any other publicly available external metric, then that blog must have good dialogue going with its readers, meaning that they think the blog is garnering a lot of comments and is a “success.”

The Question Restated

So back to the central question posed earlier, “Does the Alexa ranking influence the amount of comments that a blog will receive?” Or read that as “Does the Alexa contribute to blog success?” I’ll continue the discussion on this topic in my next post.

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