Compete - Free web site traffic history and competitive analytics tool

Posted on August 27, 2007 at 8:08 am

Compete is an online service that takes the collective online experience of over 2 million people and analyzes it to generate useful reports like SnapShot, which details number of visitors, site ranking, and trustworthiness of a site. Using the web site metrics and search analytics tools provided by Compete, market researchers and advertisers can track performance against competitors or peers, discover keywords or terms that drive more targeted traffic, and see how fast a site is growing over time.

Compete gets most of it’s data through the process of click-sharing. Click-sharing are online users who have either installed the Compete toolbar (similar to Alexa) or shared data through major ISPs and ASPs. That data is normalized and distinguished from International users to ensure the metrics are representative of only the US population.

Using Compete, you can compare and analyze traffic data for multiple web sites at once, thus giving a clearer picture of where you stand against your competitors. To get a snapshot view of a web site, enter the URL in the three boxes at the top.

The graph below will give you data on number of visitors, monthly rank, time spent on web site, pages per visit, and the growth of the web site over time.

Compete visitor data may not match internal log files of site statistics because they ignore bots/spiders, pingbacks, RSS updates and only provide data from humans who are in the Compete click-sharing community. Compete also provides a trust score for each web site, which warns you of suspicious sites that may contain spyware or are scam/phishing sites. Trust scores are determined by site history, domain name evaluation, third-part security services (GeoTrust and CastleCops), community feedback and Compete research.

Another cool feature of Compete is that it can find promotions, deals, coupons and deal codes on the Internet. For example, if you are profiling Amazon.com, you will see at the bottom left a list of current promotions on the web site:

This a great way for marketers to figure out which web site has the best promotions to get traffic if they want to promote their own products. For consumers, it’s a good way to find the best deals by comparing a few retailers online.

You can also perform regular web searches using Compete by clicking on the Search tab instead of SnapShot. By doing this, Compete performs a search using Yahoo and merges it’s ranking and traffic history data into the results to help you pick the highest quality result.

If you like Compete, you can install the toolbar for FireFox and IE so that you can get the trust scores, site profiles, and deal finder while browsing the web. This will help you determine whether a site is trusted or not, how popular the site is on the Internet, and whether there are any current promotions or coupons that can help you save money on that site!

You can also download a Netvibes or iGoogle widget to place on your Google personalized homepage or Netvibes homepage. You can track up to three sites at a time using the widget. Compete also has a search analytics service in beta to help with keywords that you can use on your web site.

You can sign up for free to save snapshots, compare more sites at once, vote on sites, and export the data to CSV format if you like. Enjoy!