Alexa gives you quick web metrics on the go!

From time to time, I receive inquiries from companies that do not have any analytics capabilities (Google Analytics, web trends, Omniture) embedded into their web site. Often, they do not have a good sense of who is visiting their web site, for how long, what are the referring sources and so on ... I found out there was a way to get these analytics without installing any code in any web site. Alexa.com crawls the web and consolidates basics analytics for the majority of web sites. This is what I gathered for the web site hotels.com:

1. About 1,000 visitors researched the web site yesterday (09.12.09)
2. They looked at 4.4 pages on average
3. The bounce back rate (i.e. how many people left the web site after landing on the home page) was 31.3%
4. Visitors spend on average 4.7 minutes
5. There are 2,824 inbound links to hotels.com
6. Keywords used to find hotels.com were: hotels.com, hotels, hotel, cheap hotels etc ... Alexa.com also gives a set of visitor demographics:

The information is not as robust as let's say an Omniture report but this provides a good proxy to basic analytics. And it does not require installing any code into the web site. This is perfect for individuals who do not have access to companies sets of analytics.