Comments on: How Compete.com kicked everyones Ass

By: Fahad

Fahad — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 04:42:49 +0000

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.

By: Jason

Jason — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:28:58 +0000

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

By: Brian Kotlyar

Brian Kotlyar — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:38:54 +0000

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.

By: Anand Chhatpar

Anand Chhatpar — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:06:42 +0000

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.

By: Laura M

Laura M — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:15:18 +0000

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

By: Laura M

Laura M — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:43:35 +0000

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 )

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:11:32 +0000

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

By: Allie Osmar

Allie Osmar — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:00:22 +0000

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.

By: Ted Rheingold

Ted Rheingold — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:39:49 +0000

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.

By: Noah Kagan

Noah Kagan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:26:40 +0000

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.