Going Beyond Your Own Website Analytics
Your website traffic is may be growing and your daily visits increasing but how do you look to the outside? And how is your competition doing? An important part of your online strategy should be edging out the competition in terms of visitors and traffic so here are a couple of tools that can help you track this valuable information.
Alexa - They’ve been around a long time and although the company has seen it’s better days (before Google was king of search) they still have great data that can be helpful to see where you stand and what data they have about your visitors. Alexa gets it’s data from visitors who use their toolbar or browser extension. The extension shows the visitor how popular the website is and in return Alexa gets data about which website they visit. You may even want to install it yourself but note that your usage will influence their rankings.
Compete - Compete works like Alexa in that they use a panel of internet users but no one really knows where they get their data exactly. If you pay for a subscription you can get very detailed analysis including demographic information as well but note that your website has to be pretty popular in the first place to even show results.
It’s important to note that neither of these solutions give you the actual visitor or hit rates but they can give you a clue as to where you place in comparison to your competition.
