If you want to keep an eye on how your Web traffic matches up to competitors’ in several key areas, these tools are your absolute best bet:
- Alexa.com: Alexa’s key strength is that provides easy-to-read graphs that allow you to directly compare your company’s traffic to the traffic one or more other companies are generating over the course of months, or even years. This way, you get a sense of what promotions, campaigns or products drove the most traffic and how you can use that to increase your own online visibility. Alexa’s one downfall is that it isn’t 100% reliable when it comes to current numbers, as those sometimes take weeks to aggregate. Despite that, it still provides tremendous insight.
- Compete.com: Whereas most Web analytics sites are built for generic online users, Compete is specifically designed with Marketing executives in mind. This site allows you to regularly monitor competitors’ traffic, but it also has resources that determine how companies can maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid search terms. Finally, Compete can help companies pinpoint where and how their key demographics spend their time on the Web, so companies can target those areas for ad campaigns, brand messaging and customer feedback.
- QuantCast: The key difference between Quantcast and Compete is that Quantcast takes a company’s Web traffic statistics and uses them to help companies identify who their (or their competitors’) most common Web visitors are (i.e., age, location, interests, etc.), and what other sites they frequent. This is a valuable tool for companies that are unsure who visits their website on a regular basis and how they can capitalize on that info. It may be even more interesting to do searches based on your competitors’ websites to see if they’re attracting a market or demographic your site isn’t (and how they’re doing so).
Source: “7 tools to monitor your competitors’ traffic,” by Sam Crocker, SocialMedia.biz, 1/10/11.
