Comments on: Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Why, What & How to Choose

By: Comparative Metrics – How many people visit my competitor’s website? « Trionia Digital Marketing Blog

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:36:33 +0000

[...] “Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Why, What & How to Choose”, Occam’s Razor Blog by Avinash Kaushik, http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/08/competitive-intelligence-analysis-why-what-how-to-choose.html [...]

By: Mark Baum

Mark Baum — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:51:56 +0000

You might also want to look at Syntryx Executive Marketing Solutions for more affordable and yet more comprehensive online marketing intelligence option, especially for affiliate networks and SEO purposes. Oh, and you might also want to know that Syntryx reports will include contact details and what site/network each prospect is already working with. I don’t think any other supplier in this field provides that type of rich info on over 25 million sites.

Cheers,
Assaf

By: Lakes

Lakes — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:07:22 +0000

Are there any updates to this “problem” of not having one completely accurate source? Are these before mentioned companies more accurate now that there was such press about them in the fall of 2006?

By: Ajay Dhunna

Ajay Dhunna — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:15:50 +0000

Hi Avinash.

I am doing some research on behalf of a client to see who is the nearest competitor to Hitwise, as I would then like to research their equivalent package.

Would it be possible to suggest some? It would be great getting some opinions from yourself other than with respect, the participants of this blog.

ps. I am currently in the middle of reading your book, “Web-Analytics - An hour a day”. Great Reading so far.. Well done!

Ajay

By: Alexa Ranking: Do you need it. at Mykarma.in - Consulting Redefined

Alexa Ranking: Do you need it. at Mykarma.in - Consulting Redefined — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:47:32 +0000

[...] Alexa Traffic can be used as acompetitive intelligence tool, but you should take into consideration the fact that the audience sample size is fairly small. Just enter your competitor’s site in the “Compare Sites” section and measure the results of your web marketing efforts in comparison with your competitors’. [...]

By: Unofficial blog @ desiblogz

Unofficial blog @ desiblogz — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:40:35 +0000

Alexa Ranking: Do you need it….

What is Alexa Ranking and how Important it is?…

By: bathroom

bathroom — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:20:35 +0000

Very interesting post. I am wondering how Compete.com,Alexa.com and quantcast.com integrate to this market.

By: How Important is Alexa Ranking?

How Important is Alexa Ranking? — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:37:09 +0000

[...] Alexa Traffic can be used as a competitive intelligence tool, but you should take into consideration the fact that the audience sample size is fairly small. Just enter your competitor’s site in the “Compare Sites” section and measure the results of your web marketing efforts in comparison with your competitors’. [...]

By: Netflix Reads Grok, Blockbuster Misses Opportunity

Netflix Reads Grok, Blockbuster Misses Opportunity — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:51:27 +0000

[...] One possibility for Blockbuster would’ve been to use its “employee discount” leek as mentioned at HackingNetflix.com. To capitalize on its competitor’s conversion problems, they only needed to purchase PPC ads for “Netflix coupon,” where they could’ve offered Netflix customers a Blockbuster coupon on a customized landing page. As of today, only five ads currently appear on Google for that search term.

Moral of the story: Follow your competitors. Look for their conversion mishaps, and capitalize on them. [...]

By: LooMag » Blog Archive » How Important Is Alexa Ranking? - A SEO Magazine.

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 23:37:45 +0000

[...] • Alexa Traffic can be used as a competitive intelligence tool but what you should take into account, is the fact that the audience sample size can be easily labelled as small; Your only task is to enter your competitor’s site URL in the “Compare Sites” section and assess the results of your web marketing efforts in comparison with your competitors’. [...]

By: Gil

Gil — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:18:41 +0000

Very interesting post. I am wondering how Compete.com and quantcast.com integrate to this market. Do they give enough information to allow us to give up comScore or Hitwise? Will they do it in the future? How do they going to make money if they don’t sell anything?

By: Bogdan Gavrila

Bogdan Gavrila — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:13:37 +0000

Great tips Avinash! :)

By: David Warmuz

David Warmuz — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:16:34 +0000

Also look at Trellian Competitive Intelligence solution.

Similar to Hitwise/Comscore but more affordable and provides reports all the way down the end URL, not just domain.

Also splits traffic from search engines into searches that yield click from:
- organic results
- paid inclusion results in the case of Yahoo
- PPC campaigns on Google/Yahoo

Cheers
David

By: RC cola

RC cola — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:31:14 +0000

Great post Avinash. This is an excellent assesment of both Hitwise and ComScore.

I must say that I am in agreement with Seb, the previous commenter. Compete combines the positive aspects of Hitwise and ComScore into one service. They also offer free analytics, check it out snapshot.compete.com/hitwise.com+comscore.com+compete.com+

By: Seb

Seb — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 03:35:05 +0000

I stumbled onto your post on Competitive Intelligence. Very well written, thank you. I am familiar with both services you mentioned. However, take a look at Compete at compete.com and competeinc.com. We have been using it extensively and feel their data quality and intelligence to be far superior.

By: Naff’s Net » Sample Size vs. Sample Bias

Naff’s Net » Sample Size vs. Sample Bias — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:42:11 +0000

[...] There are numerous posts online about how the various online measurement firms present very different views on things like unique users and page views. A few of the better ones I’ve read include Fred Wilson’s ‘Whose Numbers are right?‘, Donna Bogatin’s ‘Data Attraction: Hard science or numbers game?’ and Avinash Kaushik’s detailed analysis of how Hitwise and Comscore get their data. I’ve even commented on Alexa’s fallibility w.r.t. Judy’s Book Traffic. [...]

By: WebMetricsGuru

WebMetricsGuru — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 03:55:31 +0000

Top 10 Search Engines according to Nielsen//NetRatings…

I have a hard time with all the measurements I get from different Market Research companies. Data from Nielson NetRatings appears to be measuring audience while HitWise appears to be looking at total search volume (in the US mainly). …

By: Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:20:58 +0000

Chris/Manoj: CIA is something that you have to have a fit for. (Sounds cool saying CIA, I mean Competitive Intelligence Analysis of course.)

There is massive amount of data in HitWise (or ComScore) that can add incredible value to any organization. I have found though that a critical self diagnosis is important before purchase. Two criteria:

1) Are there resources smart enough from a business perspective to dig into the data and find relevant gold (relevant being the important word in the world of CIA)?

2) Is the business at a level of maturity that they can action the insights that are found from the data?

If the answer to any of this is “maybe” then clearly the toll will not add any value and a company is better off spreading that around as a bonus to employees. : )

(Manoj: The answer to your search volume question is complex and the answer is “it depends”. Data capture by each tool is done so differently that it is hard to answer the question without asking you a couple more questions. In my humble experience I have found HitWise to be most optimal for our search trend needs.)

By: WebMetricsGuru

WebMetricsGuru — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 02:53:57 +0000

Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Why, What & How to Choose…

Avinash Kaushik’s posts are always well thought out and well written - Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Why, What & How to Choose is his latest post and has real gems of insight such as: " If your website gets more than one millio…

http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2006/08/competitive_intelligence_analy.html

By: Webmetricsguru

Webmetricsguru — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 02:37:07 +0000

Thanks for the post Avinash! Competitive Analysis is one of my specialites and it’s interesting to hear from the comments to your post that two people who had HitWise Subscriptions did not renew them.

Also, you hit on a very significant point that a site with under 1 million uniques would be better off with HitWise than ComScore. I think I’ll write up a post on Webmetricsguru tonight on CA.