Category: Marketing

How Compete.com kicked everyones Ass

If you haven’t noticed in the past 4 months slowly all the techies, bloggers, VCs, soccer moms, etc… refer to compete.com for all site traffic.

WTF happened to Alexa? Remember them, we use to clamor over those #s for our sites and others to prove that we are worth some valuation .

And before that a few of us checked out technorati.com to see how we stacked up in the internet world. There’s also quantcast but I’m not sure who actually uses that.

So how did this slowly happen under our eyes? Honestly, I don’t know but it was really interesting to realize this last night. I can take a stab at how they did it:

- Their traffic was more accurate and reliable than Alexa. Their data comes partially from ISPs which is actual traffic of sites and not as skewed where Alexa’s came from browser and toolbar installs. Which tend to favor IE users.
- They had great blog posts comparing many interesting sites that got picked up many blogs.

What’s the future? Google Trends for websites (maybe)

Why do I compare traffic? It helps me determine which sites are relatively succeeding and then analyze them to see how they got to that point.

What do you think?

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12 Responses to “How Compete.com kicked everyones Ass”

  • Will
    September 4th, 2008
    12:07 pm

    If I am not mistaking though, Compete only gives you US traffic, they exclude all international traffic. For most, this does not matter, but for those that get a decent amount of traffic outside the US, their compete numbers are going to skew on the low side, which makes it difficult to compare apples to apples.

  • rob
    September 4th, 2008
    12:24 pm

    they also made a UI focused on traffic comparison. you used to have to dig into alexa to get traffic data. alexa has ripped off compete’s design now and smacks you in the face with traffic comparisons and tantalizing input fields.

  • Noah Kagan
    September 4th, 2008
    12:26 pm

    will. true. who cares about those other countries though:P

    rob,

    good call. traffic wise they aren’t 100% accurate but in terms of relative comparison it is really useful.

  • Ted Rheingold
    September 4th, 2008
    4:39 pm

    Compete’s strategy of using ISP logs is far superior than Alexa’s reliance on IE6 users that still had the toolbar. In the Alexa didn’t care their data quality was off-base for the last 3 years other than writing press releases to say it was great.

    Compete’s data is good, but when you sample <3% of all internet traffic, it’s very easy for a small deviance (such as netzero is not a popular ISP with your users) to throw off the numbers they show for you. But compete has been great are reflecting a site’s growth trends and they are still my preferred comparative source. Google trends also gets regular clicks from me.

    However, one insight you’re missing (until now ;) is how important Quantcast is. It’s extremely popular with a crowd the tech community often forgets about, advertsiers and advertising agencies. Quantcast does a pretty good job of showing demographic data alongside site usage data. Age, sex, wealth, race, us/non-us data points are all available and they do a pretty good job getting it right (at least with the sites I know the actual data).

    But yes, Alexa is dead. I saw the body with my own eyes.

  • Allie Osmar
    September 4th, 2008
    9:00 pm

    I’ve started comparing results across Compete, Quantcast and Google AdPlanner. I don’t necessarily trust AdPlanner’s demographic information yet, but traffic breakdowns by country have been useful.

  • Jay
    September 5th, 2008
    7:11 am

    @Allie and @Ted, check out http://attentionmeter.com. Useful for doing cross service (compete, quantcast, etc) comparisons.

  • Laura M
    September 5th, 2008
    7:43 am

    Compete’s rise to the top started in May 2007 when they opened their api so people could use their data on other sites across the web. They saw a huge spike in traffic and awareness. They had gotten more visibility in 6 months of their open API, than in 6 years of PR. Making the data available also gave them the opportunity to establish a new segment by partnering with major search engines. The acquired new partners such as ZooomInfo shows Compete stats on each page and over 100′s of thousands of Firefox users leverage a Compete search stats plugin from their browser. (see presentation )

  • Laura M
    September 5th, 2008
    10:15 am

    sorry, forgot the link to the presentation
    http://www.mashery.com/solution/resources.html

  • Anand Chhatpar
    September 5th, 2008
    12:06 pm

    The only reason I use Compete instead of Alexa is because it tells me total number of unique visitors and pageviews as opposed to what Alexa shows — some kind of percentage of total web visitors, which is very vague.

  • Brian Kotlyar
    September 5th, 2008
    2:38 pm

    One thing that is nice about Alexa though is that you can query historical data going back much further than Compete. Of course that feature is kind of broken right now because they are revamping all of their data in order to address the browser toolbar issue everyone else brought up.

  • Jason
    September 7th, 2008
    2:28 pm

    Blowing my own trumpet but I use http://www.trafficestimate.com

  • Fahad
    October 11th, 2008
    9:42 pm

    I use google trends for comparing traffic between sites. I believe its quite accurate as they can easily gather statistics from google search, google analytics, etc.

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