New features from Compete.com can help online publishers scope out your competitors and expand your online vocabulary
Compete.com is one of our staple tools for conducting market research and reporting key metrics. Today around noon, they launched “the new Compete.com”.
Their first facelift, back in 2007 was for their 1-year anniversary and focused on better usability and enhanced search capabilities. This time around, it’s all about functionality.
Before the site launched today, Compete promised users that there would be (1) user generated tagging, (2) improved graphing (3) daily digest emails and (4) an enhanced user interface.
When I privately messaged Compete on Twitter about the rollout, and what features would be free vs. paid, @compete told me that “all features will be free except for email digests, since those metrics are paid.”
When I asked them if they were heading in the direction of an entire analytics package, like Google Analytics, they humbly said, “that would be an honor – think Google Analytics with visibility into your competitors”. My thoughts exactly.
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What popped out of the Compete womb today around 1pm EDT was pretty impressive. If there were ever a client-side analytics package that didn’t take any effort on your part, this would be it.
Let’s take a quick look at a before and after comparison of the free Compete.com tools (click the image to open the large version):
As you can see, the new interface looks a whole lot like Google Analytics (in a good way).
Possibly the most helpful new feature is the “Daily Digest”, which is a part of their paid membership. It works like “Google Alerts”, except that it sends you alerts when you reach certain metrics, get found on certain keywords, and tells you where your traffic is coming from.
If you’re a Compete.com member, go sign up for that digest!
About two years ago (almost to the day), I wrote a post on folksonomy, the process of naming things in the common language of your users; especially in tags.
With the new Compete.com, visitors can tag your site in their own words on Compete, which in turn helps you understand how users define a site, brand or product.
Currently, we use Compete.com as part of our key metrics toolkit to track unique visitors (currently under “Monthly Normalized Metrics” on the new site) and also as a client-side tool to track the number of keywords we have vs. our competitors, aka “Search Analytics”.
With the new Compete.com, you can more effectively compare your competitors all on the same page. If you compare BHG.com and MarthaStewart.com, you’ll now see:
- Unique Visitors
- Monthly Change %
- Yearly Change %
- Top Search Terms
- Top Referral Sites
- Top Destination Sites
- Top Tags
As a market comparison and research tool, this is just invaluable.
Helpful tips from Compete on their new redesign:
- Site Analytics is now named “Site Profiles”. Find detailed data on a single domain or use the Compare Sites report to benchmark across multiple domains. Search Analytics, Referral Analytics and Ranked Lists are all updated as well.
- As a registered MyCompete member, navigate to the sites that interest you. On the lower right hand corner of the page, add your tags or vote up community tags.
- Compare myspace.com’s UV’s vs. Pages/Visit. It is a great example of traffic trending down for MySpace, but visitors looking at more pages per visit—looks like the core audience is hanging around longer than ever.
- If you are a Compete PRO subscriber, run a Site Comparison report. Just below the “Compare” button click on “Add to Portfolio”. Once created, make sure that your email preferences for “Compete.com Portfolio Digest” are turned on to receive Daily Digests.
With their paid plan ($199-$499 monthly), you can get more in-depth reports and metrics. If you ever wanted to tap into your competitors’ back-end analytics, Compete.com is still (and now even more so) your best bet at an online spy.
To learn more about our key metrics toolkit and how you can develop a key metrics dashboard that works for your company, subscribe to Mequoda Pro for a full year at the low rate of just $197 per year.
