If your not familiar with compete.com, you might want to check it out. With your “pro” status you can view 2 years worth of information. To start with, login and then add in your site.
Using this as a competitive analysis - “compete” get it? You can see how your site stacks against its competition in the form of people visits, page views, visits monthly, rank monthly etc. 
This screen shot shows people count.
Some of the metrics within the analytics Pro area include:
- Compare web traffic trends across up to 5 competitors
- Use Daily Reach to see how traffic changes daily
- Gain access to Pro exclusive metrics such as total page views
- View monthly traffic data for over 2 years
Now, I know you can get most of this data within your own analytics program, but here are some of the things you might not see: Finding terms that drive traffic to your competitors - how ingenious - well this should be a part of your overall strategy. Using a combination of these keywords and looking in your web logs at the internal searches can help possibly creating a new category or several new pages within your site.
Benchmark your search performance against competitors- another real important factor - you should always know what your competition is doing and by base-lining this type of metric is real helpful.
What I like first is the visuals, like clicktracks, it’s nice to look at and can make boring numbers and lengthy analytics look hot - ok, I’m being facetious, but the point is it helps to see what’s going on right away, you don’t need a PhD in statistics to understand this informatino. If you have more information to help support your overall goals, the better. I personally like all the information I can get, helps compare apples to apples with my webtrends data and Google analytics. Don’t do what most people do and get lost in the minutia — very easy to get dizzy in the granularity of your analytics.
I have tried the toolbar and don’t feel it’s real helpful -in fact I found it was more “in the way” than anything else. It gives you information like “trust scores” - warning you of so called safe sites and avoiding those that may have malicious behavior associated with them, unless your finding yourself having so many PC problems you need to clean your hard drive out every other day, I don’t feel this as a necessary.
Site profiles sort of reminds me of the Alexa popularity action - how popular the site is (according to who?), where the site ranks (unless your ebay, amazon, forget it - this should depend on your vertical or market anyway). Then there’s the “deal light” unless all you do is shop online all day, not sure how real effective this is. It automatically lights up if there are any special deals on a site - sorry but if your on a site and a deal or coupon is to be had, most likely it’s already in view of the shopper - most people are savy enough shoppers online to know how to find a deal, at least I that’s my experience.
I am going to install the iGoogle widget - so far it’s a nice image, but the data showing is for NYTimes, Digg and Forbes - so time will tell as to whether I nix this thing off my Igoogle or not.
There are a great many other good things within this application, I have honestly not even dug into check completely yet. As I actually sign up for the Pro membership, I will from time to time, include further reviews.
Overall, as far as competitive analysis programs goes, this one is worth checking out.
Recent Comments