I was looking into direct ad buys, and was inquiring with one of our vendors as to what they look for when buying ads.
In the course of the conversation, the PR rep mentioned that Amazon is closing Alexa (apparently as of January 27th, but their site appears to be up). She told me of two other online measurements: quantcast.com and compete.com.
Alexa has had us listed as low for several months, whereas these new tools show us competing in-line (and in some cases surpassing) with our closest competitors, which appears to be more accurate.
Also, one way to “boost” Alexa’s numbers was to use their Alexa toolbar, which doesn’t work in Vista. Compete.com has a toolbar that works! Please install it, especially if you visit OCMS a lot!
I’m working on a marketing brochure with these demographic numbers, so we can get more sweet lovin’ from vendors.