Compete Search Analytics: Competitive Intelligence Smackdown!

Posted by DigitalAlex
November 15, 2007

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Over at Search Marketing Gurus I just posted my review of Compete Search Analytics (thanks to Product Manager Jeremy Crane for his time). I wrote up an overview of the tool, how you can use it and even some insight into developments in store for the future.

Turning the tables a bit, I thought it might be interesting to how Compete.com is doing in relation to rivals Hitwise, Quantcast and Alexa.

This graphs shows the trend of unique visitors (”people” in Compete’s terms, which I don’t agree with)

Quantcast Rising

June marked a notable turning point for rival Quantcast which started to ascend rapidly and hasn’t stopped yet. Quantcast, which is billed as the only open internet ratings tool, lets both advertisers find the right sites to advertise on and publishers to open up their stats to potentially ad space buyers. There could be a viral affect as more and more sites tag themselves for quantification and word spreads.

Alexa, once a leader in traffic, began slipping as early as February and finally dipped into the 3rd place spot in September.

It looks like Compete is being fast outpaced by Quantcast. As they build buzz around their search analytics product they may see a boost. Unfortunately, they don’t provide data at the subdomain level, so I can’t pull out that segmented traffic.

Dehumidifiers: The Key To Web Analytics Success?

One of the most interesting features of Compete Search Analytics is that you can do some keyword research based on categories of sites (like sports magazines or music sites) as well has behavioral targets (like African Americans or Bargain Hunters). The results show you popular keywords among these groups based on sites they visit (behavioral segments) or the sites in the category.

While writing my review, I compiled the entire list of segments (included below for your reference). I noticed a Web Analytics segment on the list, further broken down by Competitive (sites like Compete and Quantcast) and local (meaning traditional tag based sites).

Curious, I ran the report of popular keywords for web analytics local. Not surprisingly, Omniture was high on the list, as well as free tool StatCounter. Google Analytics was nowhere to be found, which was a little perplexing (does it have something to do with Compete not yet tracking subdomains?).

When I started to scrolling through the rest of the list, the keywords got a little more surprising. Dehumidifiers was in the top 10. Perhaps the dehumidifier merchants of the world are more analytically inclined than I suspect…

Another portion of the list was, shall we say, a little risque. I’m not sure how some vendors might be SEOings their site, but I doubt “midget sex” is a common phrase. What’s more likely is that we’re dealing with a small sample size of visits to these sites.

Let that be a reminder to you to take all competitive intelligence data with a grain of salt, especially for small sample sizes.

Full Segment List
This is a complete list of the site categories and behavior segments available in the site referral report in Compete Search Analytics. Just pick a category of sites or behavioral segment and find out which words most often lead to sites in that category or sites favored by that segment. I’ve noticed some quirky results in an off few of these reports, so just use common sense when interpreting the data.

Automotive

Blogging

Career and Education

Entertainment Guide

Excluded Sites

Financial Services

Gaming

Government

Health

Hobbies and Interests

Incentive Programs

Music and Video

News and Media

Portals

Products

Reference

Search

Services

Shopping

Social Networking

Travel

Web Analytics

Web Communication

Wireless

Other

Behavioral Segment

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Pingback by Primary Intelligence Blog: Intelligence for Business » Blog Archive » From the world of Competitive Intelligence on December 5, 2007 @ 5:38 pm

[...] Compete Search Analytics: Competitive Intelligence Smackdown! Let that be a reminder to you to take all competitive intelligence data with a grain of salt, especially for small sample sizes. Full Segment List This is a complete list of the site categories and behavior segments available in the … [...]

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