subject: How Many People Are Going To My Competitor's Sites? [print this page] When you're running a website, you're in direct competition with many other websites in most cases. As any internet marketing guru will tell you, gaining intelligence on the competition is a very valuable internet marketing tool. While looking at their site is important and can tell you much about their business, without one key bit of information it will be difficult to infer their success. What you really need to know is, how much traffic is your competitor's site getting?
The good news is that there are ways that you can find this information. In fact, you can even find it out without spending too much money. There are some free resources on the web that you can use to get a picture of the amount of visitors that your competitors are getting to their site. There are also paid services out there that you can use to get a more accurate and detailed image of the traffic that your competition is driving.
Alexa is a tool which you should always use to get your first rough picture of the traffic that your competitors are getting. Alexa doesn't give you exact traffic numbers. What it does give you, is a ranking of where a site is listed in terms of the sites which have the most traffic online, i.e.: Google is number one. What this tool can do is allow you to see how your competitors rank relative to you. You can check your traffic numbers via your analytics program and then compare your ranking to your competitor's to get a rough idea of how they are doing in terms of traffic.
If Alexa isn't providing you with information which is specific enough, your next move might be to use some of the tools which Google provides to you for estimating traffic. For instance, using Google trends you can view the traffic that some sites located in certain regions are obtaining.
There are also some paid tools which you can use for estimating your competitors traffic. There are a number of competing tools out there which claim to offer this service, but it can be difficult to estimate just how accurate they are. If you want to try one of those tools, try targeting it at your own site. Compare the data that the tool provides you with to the data you get from the analytics you have installed to see how accurate the data is.
