FireFox referrals counterproductive?

I was thinking about Firefox and how counterproductive it might be for AdSense (and other advertising programs) publishers.

First of all, when I buy AdWords campaigns targetting a specific site, I almost always use the Alexa score rather than the PageRank. Alexa seems to be fairly accurate. The problem is that I don't believe there are any Firefox toolbars that properly pass on to Alexa the sites you've visited. I know it is mildly spyware, but it does have a decent response. I, myself, run FireFox, and I do have a toolbar that shows the Alexa ratings, but I don't think the toolbar adds to Alexa's ranking score.

Secondly, when people buy ads on my sites from text-link-ads.com (I have 9 out of 10 ads sold), they use the Alexa rating as well. Since I've moved a lot of readers to Firefox, my Alexa rating has fallen -- even though traffic is up!

I'm canning the Firefox referrals because it is an unworthy click out. The return doesn't pass the cost to me.

Thoughts?

 

I don't have a comment on the firefox referrals, but I do have a comment on the Alexa ranking.

It does not seem to accuretely refelect how my site is doing. For example, I jumped up to a 15 reach on November 1 with about 53,000 hits. However, yesterday I had almost 100,000 hits but did not even register above a 1.0 reach. I'm not arguing that it isn't fairly accurate overall, but it isn't really on the money sometimes in terms of a sites overall success.

You may be thinking that since reach is calculated based on users and not on page views that I may have something odd going on with visitors viewing a lot of pages each, but the same thing happened on the "page views" chart on Alexa.

My target audience is college students and a much higher percentage use firefox (and therefore no Alexa toolbar) compared to the general population, which could explain the lack of ranking. Nevertheless, it is just something to think about when considering that ranking.

 

Well I don't use the Firefox referral buttons (or any of Google's referral buttons) because they're just Godawful fugly and they ruin the look of every site I've ever put them on.

 

Jack: I agree

ND: The thing that I see most is that the sites with the highest Alexa rankings have the best income (AdSense and TLA and others). I think FIrefox is counterproductive if you think about it -- my traffic is about 60% Firefox versus 30% Firefox last year, and my income per visitor is down, but so is my Alexa ranking.