Imagine this very common scenario. You have spent hours pouring over your analytics data slicing and dicing the images, trend lines, segments, referrals, etc. A few questions about what page visits mean or how unique visitors are trending and if things are growing in the right direction. Then this question comes up which you might not have thought about and usually from someone in a higher pay grade.
How do these metrics compare to our competitors?
Of course, it's an obviously simple question, but not one that is easy to answer. You don't have access to your competitor's analytics information, only yours. I'm glad to see that there are tools that try to answer some of the competitor questions. I just signed up with compete.com and paid for the pro version hoping it'll give more than just directional data. There are others such as comscore and hitwise. Compete seems to have the easiest UI to use.
In the sample screenshot of Facebook against LinkedIn you can see some overall trends and stats over a 2 year period. If I drill down deeper, there are some better details for optimized keywords that bring traffic to the site, etc. It seems to be very useful in benchmarking some trends against competition, but again just directional data. I would look at the percentage more than the actual numbers. Some of the segmentation data in terms of the age, income, gender data is just ok.
The biggest shocker is that the data under reports statistics so it won't match any of the web analytics data. Their unique visitor count is based on a very "sophisticated" measurement on a sample of the US internet population. Tracking is not cookie based but by audience sampling and reminds me of the Nielson ratings. (Yes, US internet users.)
No comments:
Post a Comment