Three Favorite (and Free) Online Competitive Analysis Tools

Three Favorite (and Free) Online Competitive Analysis Tools

here are a myriad of sites and tools, both free and paid, that can help you track how well your Web site is performing versus your competitors. Here are a few of my favorite, free online competitive analysis tools.

1. Web Traffic Comparison—Compete.com We all know our own traffic numbers from our analytics system (and we at least hope that our IT staff set things up properly so that the data is accurate). But what we really want to know is how much traffic our competitors are generating and how we stack up against them. There are a host of free players in this space (Alexa, Quantcast, Google Trends) as well as several paid services. All have different methodologies, different strengths and weaknesses, and all vary in their accuracy.

My favorite free tool for Web traffic comparison is Compete.com, and my favorite report is the Unique Visitor report. The actual reported traffic numbers are under-reported (compare them to your own analytics to see the difference), and don’t get hung up on a single month’s data point, which also has a margin of error. However, the trends and the relative comparison to your competitors are where the real value lies. It does a good job of showing whether your traffic is growing versus your competitors’ and annual cycles in your overall market to help put your own analytics in perspective. By the way, none of the traffic-comparison tools do a good job with small sites (fewer than 20,000 unique visitors per month). There’s just not enough data to draw accurate trends.

Sign up for a free account at Compete.com, and you’ll be able to compare up to five sites at a time and create saved portfolios of up to five sites each. This is handy when you have multiple sites in different markets and need to look at the competitive landscape of each market quickly. Of course, there are paid services available on Compete.com that offer a greater depth of information, keywords that drive traffic to your competitors, and what sites people come from and go to after visiting your competitors, but I find that the free traffic-comparison tools provide great baseline data.

Honorable mention in this category goes to AttentionMeter.com, which pulls in data from Compete, Quantcast, Google Trends, Alexa and Technorati all in one place. It’s handy, but not as deep as going to the individual comparison sites directly.

2. Search Engine Saturation—MarketLeap.com If you’re going to succeed online, you need to know how high your site ranks in the search engines. I have found a direct relationship to the number of pages indexed in the search engines and the traffic that a site generates. The metric used to measure the number of pages indexed in the search engines is called search engine saturation. You can find this by going to each of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and entering special search phrases for each site in which you’re interested. But there’s an easier way.

My favorite tool for search engine saturation is MarketLeap.com. Its Search Engine Saturation report lets you compare up to five sites and see how many pages each site has listed in the major search engines. See how well your site stacks up to your competitors’ and cross-reference this with the competitive traffic that you see in Compete.com. Search engine saturation can be a major factor in how much traffic your site generates.

MarketLeap also has a free tool called Link Popularity, which checks how many links come from other sites to yours. Inbound links are critical to building traffic from other sites, as well as improving your site’s ranking in the search engines.

3. Search Engine Spend Monitoring—SpyFu.com More media sites are spending money to acquire traffic or drive sales, especially if they have paid content or rely heavily upon registration. Just enter a competitor’s domain, and SpyFu will give you an estimate of that competitor’s paid search ad spend, how many clicks it is receiving, the average cost per click, average ad position, and the top organic and paid keywords that drive traffic to its site. Of course, you’ll need to make your own decisions on whether to spend money on driving traffic to your site or to help sell your information products, but it’s interesting to see what your competitors are doing.

There has been criticism of SpyFu’s range of error for paid ad spend, but as a free tool, it still provides good intelligence.

SpyFu also has a unique, free (and fun) report called SpyFu Kombat. This allows you to pick two sites (and a third site if you’re a paid member) and see how their paid keyword campaigns overlap. You can see which keywords your competitor is targeting that you’re not and vice versa.