Here at Communiqué PR, we’re always on the lookout for tools that make our work more efficient. Recently, we’ve been using one extra handy tool that we thought worth passing along—analytics provider Alexa.com.

Alexa.com offers free website analytics, including traffic data, national rankings, global rankings and more. These rankings give an idea of how a particular website compares to others. Although geared mainly to website owners looking to gauge their site’s popularity, Alexa also has value for PR professionals seeking more information about an online outlet.

Alexa’s service isn’t strictly about measuring statistics—it doesn’t offer a concrete number of monthly visitors, for example—but its rankings are still an excellent means for evaluating an online publication. Alexa allows you to understand which sites are more (or less) popular or engaging, and how a website’s audience compares with audiences at other publications. This material can help inform your messaging and outreach as you work to successfully reach an online outlet’s audience with a client’s story.

Specifically, in our practice we’ve found the following areas of Alexa’s analysis most helpful for PR purposes:

Website Popularity. Alexa combines the number of average daily visitors and number of daily page views of a site to estimate both global rank and U.S. rank, therefore allowing PR professionals to see how an online outlet matches up to its peers. Alexa also displays historical traffic trends that allow you to evaluate a site’s longevity or popularity stability. These longer-term trends include traffic rank, page views per user, the estimated percentage of global Internet users who visit the site and the estimated percentage of global page views on the site, among others.

Consumer Engagement. How influential is a website to users? How meaningful are consumers’ visits to the site? Alexa offers statistics about the daily page views of a site per visitor, daily time spent on the site per user and the bounce rate—the percentage of visits to the site that consist of a single page view. Ideally, the bounce rate will be relatively low and the daily page views and time spent relatively high—if you’re seeing otherwise, you’ll know that an outlet’s content is not effectively engaging viewers.

Audience Demographics. As a PR professional, understanding an outlet’s audience is crucial to creating relevant, compelling content. Alexa offers a breakdown of estimated audience demographics that reveal how similar a site’s audience is to the general Internet population. Statistics offered include age, education level, gender, children (yes or no), geographic location (country of origin) and browsing location (home, school or work). These stats will collectively help paint a picture of the typical viewer, and will therefore help you strategize how to create a message that resonates with an outlet’s audience.

As you may have deduced, one of the ways Alexa is most useful overall is for comparison: assessing how an online outlet matches up to others. In short, the best way to use Alexa is to combine all of the gathered information to determine which outlets are most relevant to clients’ interests, and therefore worth targeting. Once you’ve decided who to pitch, Alexa also helps you strategize how to pitch. Its statistics make it easy to assess an outlet in terms of multiple characteristics. As you craft content, consider using these insights to your advantage.

Have you used Alexa? What information do you find most helpful from the website? Let us know!