This is part two of a three post series on free metrics data sites. If you missed it, here's part one.
So last time we learned that Quantcast was damn good at delivering demographic profiles, but could use some tweaking. In this post, we'll learn about Compete.com, a free traffic search that puts Alexa to shame. Alexa, while giving stats on some of the largest sites on the Internet, totally forgets the little guys, and by little guys, I mean only a few thousand uniques per month. To some, this number is measly, to others, it's a bad day at the office. Plus, to make matters even more inconvenient, Alexa displays all of its data as a percentage of total Internet traffic. So you may get a traffic swing of .001% per month, but it may mean thousands and thousands of visitors.
This being said, enter Compete. Compete delivers very solid traffic results, and allows for easy comparison between up to three sites without registering as a user. You can then export this data as a CSV, copy a permalink, or embed the graphic as a linked image of varying sizes like the one below:
Compete.com is really about checking out your competitors traffic stats. It breaks down traffic into monthly uniques, monthly rank, daily reach ("Pro" only, pricing here), or totally monthly visits. Also, they measure engagement via daily and monthly attention, average monthly stay, monthly page views (Pro), pages per visit, and visits per person (Pro).
No demographic or social reach information is provided, however they do have two extra features that makes Compete.com a place to visit often: a Firefox toolbar that displays all Compete data of your current website, and a search analytics tool. With the Search Analytics tool you can track site referrals, keyword destinations, and compare sites.
Let's score this thing:
| Traffic Data | 10 |
| Demographics Data | 1 |
| Social & Blog Data | 1 |
| Bonus Features | 10 |
| Overall | 5.5 |
It is a little bit unfair to have those other two criteria in the score when judging, but for categorical sake, I'm leaving them in there.
Compete is all about raw numbers in traffic, and with that in mind, I give the crew at Compete a huge amount of respect, as Compete takes the cake when it comes to traffic numbers. However, it does lack on a few of the other points that a site like Quantcast can offer. If you really want to learn about your competitors, you're not going to get everything you want to know just by looking at how many uniques they have on a monthly basis.
What do you think about Compete.com?
Subscribe to the Appify RSS to snag the final part of this series on free web metrics.
Find part three here.
2 comments:
Excellent info and insightful analysis on both quantcast and compete.
Would be interesting to see how your visitors use the info they gather using these services. For examples, do financial analysts take traffic metrics and divide by $ revenue to get ARPUV...and is GOOG really making ~3x $revenue per visitor than YHOO per month?
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/google.com+yahoo.com/?metric=uv
http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:GOOG
http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:YHOO
Not a bad question. Depending on the profession at the time of use (blogging or interactive advertising) I could be just measuring other blog's traffic, or be checking competitive brand's analytics, demographic profiles, and/or social network penetration. I'd say mainly though, I use this metrics data for a snapshot of how well a rival brand is doing online. However, most (all?) of these free metrics services don't provide estimated spending on things like banner campaigns, and media snapshots. I know that paid services like Nielsen AdRelevance provide those features. A savior would be a free service that provided insight on media campaigns.
Post a Comment