Analyze Your Competitors
by Joshua Odmark
If you’re wondering what your competitors are doing that you are not, spend some time analyzing their practices.
A great place to start is analyzing their traffic at http://www.compete.com. The nice thing about this website is it gives you the ability to compare your website with multiple competitors giving you a side by side analyzation.
This graph displays a plethora of information. A few things this graph shows are, visitor trends, top search keywords, sub domains, trusted domains, visitor engagement, and velocity of growth.
This report is a great way to quickly view trends of your site as compared to your top competitors.
Compete.com
Our own organization uses this chart to determine whether a competitor has launched a major campaign, and if they have, we may choose to compete against their particular campaign or to reduce our spend in a related campaign.
Quantcast.com is another Gem that can help you analyze your website.
I won’t get into HOW quantcast.com has the data that they have, but there is definately some potential privacy issues with the information they obtain through ISP’s. But since that is not the topic of this particular blog, I will digress!
Here is an example of a single report generated by quantcast.com for one of our websites:
Quantcast
The thing that surprises me about this report is because we have not placed the Quantcast tracking software on our website. It just calculated that information through its own sources. “Its own sources” is apparently hundreds of ISP’s throughout the nation.
They do offer a piece of tracking software that can be placed on your website that will most likely improve the accuracy of these statistics.
It should be noted that we did not opt into Quantcast.com so that it would track our website.
