How many times have you heard: “Oh my site is getting a million hits a day” – you mosey on over to the site, look at it and wonder how on earth they’re getting that kind of traffic. Or maybe they’re not. There’s a handy new site called: Compete (http://www.compete.com). Just type in the web site address and compare it to your own. Compete will pop up with a nice little graph showing who has the biggest legs on the web. You might be surprised by what you find out. This is really helpful when you’re considering sites to pitch to. Finding out what their market share online is is huge.
This is also handy for all the hundreds of social networking sites people are recommending. Are they worth your time? Plug the URL into Compete and find out.
I tried quite a few sites, and it didn’t have any information for most of them.
I typed in your address, and it said you only had 5320 visits last month. Is this right for you? I think sites like this can be a bit misleading, as I’m not sure they have all the data. My software says I have just under 20,000 hits a month, but compete can’t find me.
I think this is probably only good for comparing the bigger sites.
Jackie – the one problem with your own site analytics is that hits can often be mistaken for hits vs. unique visitors – of 20,000 hits how many of them were unique? Your software should tell you that —
Penny – you’re right about unique hits – I’m not sure what % of those are repeat visitors. I couldn’t find any statistics on any blogs I looked at, apart from this one. So does that mean every is getting less than 5000 unique hits a month, or does Compete not have data on everyone?
Penny, Great tool. Thanks posting and you are absolutely correct about hits and unique visitors.
Best,
Scott
Penny, you are amazing.
Thank you for another fantastic tip. It really is more important than ever to know where one might get good value from the advertising buck, and where one is throwing it down the drain. Also where one is wasting precious social networking time.
So, is Squidoo really worth all the time and effort setting up a lens? I did for Knight’s Fork, Forced Mate, and Insufficient Mating Material, but don’t get many visits there unless I ask friends to go…. which defeats the point.
Thank you!
Thanks for this tip. Might make me think before doing even a cheap ad on a website. See what is worth what.
Yes, always a good idea to check it out – and be careful with ads, they have a much lower return – especially online!
Hi Penny,
Compete.com is one of our favorite “baloney detectors.” Much fun to use on your friends who claim so much web traffic. Even more important if you’re making a buying decision. We’ve interviewed the folks at Compete.com and the way they get their statistics is complicated, but sophisticated.
For the free accounts you have to look up basic web sites. I don’t know the technical terms, but you can’t look up sites that have those backslashes and, you know, most blogs. How’s that for technical knowledge!
I wrote to Aaron and suggested he leave a comment here to explain what I can’t (which is pretty much everything). Incidentally they are on Twitter – @compete
Suffice it to say, Penny, this is a hugely valuable tool to find out who’s jiving you about their web traffic. Thanks for posting it.