There are many ways to gather competitive intelligence on your competitors. From using free services like Alexa to paid ones such as Hitwise and Neilsen//Netratings. But another player in the free market space has been making strides. It is called Compete.
Compete is the brainchild of Goto founder and former Yahoo! executive Bill Gross.
Compete is based on the idea of “click-sharing.” Click-sharing is when a variety of users share their experiences (clicks) with other users to help build a profile of the web including good sites, bad sites and everything else in between.
Compete is used to answer many questions including:
- Is this Web site safe from spyware and other threats like phishing?
- How many people visit this site and how does it compare to other sites?
- Are there promotion codes for this site that can save me money?
Why use compete when you can use Alexa?
Compete is different than Alexa in that it doesn’t rely solely on data gathered from users who have installed a toolbar.
Compete gathers data from a few different sources including ISP’s, their own Toolbar, as well as various opt-in panels. From over 2 million users they are able to perform complex mathematical analysis (including age, income, gender and geographic analysis) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population.
What does Compete Offer?
Compete offers a variety of services including their own Toolbar, a search feature, a personalized home page and “SnapShot” – their competitive intelligence tool.
SnapShot is free to use. Simply go to their website and enter the domain you wish to learn more about. SnapShot then returns a variety of data about that site. If you wish you, you can also compare the traffic of up to 3 sites (5 if you create a free account and log in).
In the screenshot about you can see that we compared the traffic of Yahoo, Google and MSN. According to Compete, Yahoo receives the most visitors while Google is second and MSN is third. This is to be expected as this is for the domain “yahoo.com” which includes any subdomains, such as mail.yahoo.com.
In the next screenshot we are able to see the average rank of the three sites, as compared to each other:
While in this image we can see the estimated pages per visit:
As expected Yahoo is again higher, mostly due to Yahoo email.
Finally, you can view estimated average stay:
But that isn’t all. Compete also offers a variety of other information.
For example, along the right side of the page we can see the deals offered by these particular websites:
As you can see, there are currently 30 deals offered on the Yahoo domain versus none at either Google or MSN. This feature works fine for larger e-commerce domains such as Amazon and Ebay, but not so well for smaller ones.
You will also see the “trust” box. This helps tell users that this is a trusted domain. In other words, many Compete users use the domain, therefore it is trustworthy.
How Reliable is Compete?
As with other free services such as Alexa, the numbers are not 100% correct. In fact, if you were to compare the values found for your site to your own visitor traffic, you’d likely see a discrepancy.
However, if you are merely looking for an apples to apples comparison of two sites (say your site and that of your biggest competitor) it would give you an accurate representation of how the sites compare.
That being said, keep in mind that this data is still based on a representation of the population. If your competitor or his ISP happens to be a Compete member and he has his websites home page as his start page this could influence the numbers found on Compete.
Even still, it does give you an idea of where you may need to go with your site in order to improve. Using data from Compete with other sites like Alexa or SpyFu can give you a much more complete picture of your competitors.
