How does Alexa know my stats?

I was just wondering how Alexa ranks you and keeps track of your stats...

 

I believe it's through their Alexa toolbar.
Alexa's stats are mainly used as a guide rather than the actual traffic your site is receiving.

 

I kinda figured that but wasn't sure. When I had their toolbar running my site's rank shot up.

 

Alexa counts pages, traffic and aother aspects using the toolbar, indeed.

 

Alexa uses their 10M toolbar users, but think of it, how many internet user are there? Over a billion probably, so how precise the calculation should be...
And, BTW, for webmaster sites alexa rank is usually higher, because more webmasters are using the toolbar.

 

alexa ranking is not so important, there aren't that many users using the toolbar..

 

true, not a perfect tool for gauging any sites traffic.

 

funny thing is, alexa cannot tell you stats about alexa.com ...

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=alexa.com

but in general: sites with an alexa rank < 1000 are super traffic sites, everything about 1000 is just random (comparing my own traffic stats with alexa's)