How to Maximize Your Online Advertising Budget

An important way to find interested prospects for a restaurant business or location is to make sure your limited advertising dollars are spent on the highest traffic web sites. Everyone claims high traffic. Did you know you can easily get the traffic statistics from a third party to verify the site you are considering advertising on is busier than another?

www.Alexa.com has available a tool which can tell you the traffic ranking of any website, the reach, and the page views of the site.

Below, as example, are the traffic rankings of RestaurantBizOps.com compared to two competitors who specialize in advertising a restaurant business or location opportunity. Alexa.com ranks each site based on the ranking from the busiest to the slowest in terms of site traffic. Yahoo.com is ranked number 1. The lower the number, the busier the site.

RestaurantBizOps.com 69,180 *

Competitor Number One 100,8221 *

Competitor Number Two 743,842 *

*Alexa.com rankings site traffic busiest to slowest 11/1/05. Should you like to test this for yourself simply go to Alexa.com, download the tool, and search on "restaurants for sale".

The bottom line: RestaurantbizOps.com enjoys greater traffic than any restaurant listing exchange website which is exclusive to restaurants and therefore would be predicted to give you better results but also has a greater number of listings available. When you combine the traffic advantage of RestaurantBizOps.com with a more reasonable monthly investment to advertise a restaurant business or location ($29.95 per month ) we can conclude RestaurantBizOps.com provides the greatest return on investment for your advertising dollar. Of course we also know one million people a day could visit the restaurant opportunity you have listed and you still might not get results. The only thing that really counts is results. That’s why RestaurantBizOps.com has a money back guarantee.

About the Alexa Traffic Ranking

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.

What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

What is Reach?
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million. Alexa's one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current reach and reach rank with its values from three month ago.

What are Page Views?
Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user). The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current page view numbers with those from three month ago.

Page views per million indicates what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go to a particular site. For example, if yahoo.com has 70,000 page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to yahoo.com. If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can of course visit more than one site).