When I (Melanie Nathan – hi!) mentioned looking into Compete.com on Twitter, Rae sent me an email offering to pay for my access to the Standard level of Compete Pro if I’d be willing to write a review about the service and explain to her and others what the heck Compete.com actually does outside of offer sparse, free data. Score!
I’ve spent a month checking out the nooks and crannies of Compete Pro. While there were some things I think could be done better, overall, I was surprised at the accuracy and usefulness of many of the tools and reporting that they provide.
The Good, the Bad, the Awesome
Consumer behavioral data is a powerful research source and Compete seems to have a large pool of data to fish from with over 2 million members. Unfortunately, the data is based on the daily usage of US users only, which leaves a lot of guess work if you’re a business that’s targeting other regions.
The upside is that their Site Referral tool is incredibly accurate. I ran many reports using my sites and the sites of others (who were nice enough to entrust me with their top traffic driving keywords) and in most cases 95% of the queries Compete.com said were the top 30 actually WERE in the real top 30. That’s some mighty awesome competitive intelligence.
The Sharpest Tools in the Shed?
Since I found their service’s to be pretty confusing at first (actually really confusing), I created a general breakdown of what the Compete tools are and what they do.
Site Analytics:
Get up to 2 years worth of data on one site’s traffic and page views or compare multiple sites at one time. Filter criteria to focus on visitors, engagement and growth for both daily and monthly time frames.
The main downfall is that there isn’t any data available for sites that aren’t widely known:
Search Analytics:
There are three main tools within the “Search Analytics” section; Site Referral Reports, Keyword Destination Reports and Comparison Reports.
Site Referral tool: helps you understand what keyword phrases drive traffic to either a specific site or an entire industry. You can enter an individual URL and get specific data tailored to that site or you can choose a category/niche from a comprehensive drop down list of industries to get more general data.
For example, according to “Site Referral” here are the top few keywords driving traffic where it comes to the Automotive Dealers industry:
Even if the data isn’t 100% accurate it provides a nice list of related keywords depending on your industry or niche. These keywords can then be plugged into your favorite keyword research tool to determine their potential.
Keyword Destination tool: helps you understand which sites are capturing traffic from specific keyword phrases and the variations of that phrase. Plug in a keyword you uncovered using Site Referral and get a list of the top sites.
Keyword destination reports can also be helpful for identifying places to distribute content for a non-commercial term that relates to a commercial topic. You can find the sites that get the most traffic for the non-commercial term, sort them by overall traffic and start contacting them to offer them free content in exchange for publicity.
Keyword destination also allows you to search for complimentary keywords to find people you might be able to cross promote with. For example a site that features wedding supplies might do a keyword destination report on “photography” to find sites that may be willing to exchange links in a fashion that actually drives juice AND traffic between two worthwhile, complimentary sites. Same with finding places to advertise.
Comparison tool: lets you compare two different sites to highlight gaps in search referrals that might represent new search marketing opportunities for your site. For example you can see by the screenshot below that 1800flowers.com clearly has the advantage over ftd.com for the term “flowers” but ftd.com has the advantage when it comes to the term “flower delivery”.
Ranked Lists:
Another tool that Compete offers is Ranked Lists which are lists of the most popular sites across the Internet, ranked by; unique visits, visits, page views, total time spent on site or monthly attention. This feature could be utilized to judge your site’s presence in the context of its peers, find new domains to partner with or simply analyze Internet trends.
Choose to run a report on 25 domains or go all the way up to 500,000 domains (download this ranked list for the top sites in August 2008 by unique visitors for an example). If you don’t know what to make of the data (or you require more in depth data), they also offer a “Custom Analysis” solution (which I’m going to guess costs extra).
Referral Analytics:
Using this tool you can find out which sites are sending traffic to a specific website or which sites a website is sending traffic to.
Compete.com also offer information on Paid Clickthroughs, but to me, the data is extremely inaccurate. I plugged in a few sites which I know do not spend a dime on paid advertising yet it says they do. For now though, I’ve decided to reserve judgment on this tool until I experiment more.
Pricing
They offer a free (but limited) version of their service, which allows you to compare up to 5 sites at one time and export the data. You can also grab a free tool bar for your browser. With a paid plan though, you gain access to the rest of the tools and you’re able to generate more reports. The subscription is priced and billed monthly but it also offers an “Enterprise” subscription which requires contacting Compete.com for a quote to obtain pricing.
Prices for their monthly plans range from $199 to $500 and are based on Intro, Standard and Advanced usage and also how many reports you plan to generate (you can generate 50 reports per month at the $199 level and 100 reports per month at the $299 level).
If you can do without the paid vs organic search breakdowns and can live with 200 sites for your ranked lists requests, the $199 plan should be sufficient for anyone without the need to run more than 50 reports a month (50 reports is a lot of data if you actually dig deep into what you learn from the reports and act upon it).
Also, I have to note that when looking for an easy way to cancel the Compete service to ensure it existed, I realized there wasn’t one. Unfortunately, at the moment, if you want to downgrade the paid plan you’re on or cancel the service all together, you have to email customer support at membersupport@compete.com.
While annoying, when questioned about this, Compete.com’s General Manager, Gregg Poulin stated:
“We are currently in the process of developing that functionality for end users to complete it through the interface. We outsource our billing/payment system and have hit some bumps in getting the two technologies to speak to each other – that will be resolved this month.”
I look forward to seeing them follow through on this point.
Learn How to Use Compete
Compete is a tad confusing to use – at first. Like many companies, they simply hand you their tools and tell you to jump right in. If you’re a data junkie, that’s not a problem, but if you’re new to all this then you’ll probably need some help getting started. Compete’s FAQ section answers a lot of questions. It’s full of basic information on:
- Where Compete gets their data
- How to use their individual tools
- Ideas for how to read and interpret the results
The most helpful resource is probably their blog which is a wealth of information due to the case studies they regularly publish. Reading their blog will help give you a grasp on what type of data can be gathered and how it can be used to help sculpt your marketing campaign.
Who Should Use Compete?
I think any marketer or site owner can use Compete and be reasonably happy with the results. In my opinion, Compete.com is for people who need:
- Either continuous access due to large ongoing projects or a month here/month there to look up info for ongoing smaller projects
- Ballpark traffic details about popular/known sites
- Help with brainstorming for new keywords
- Help identifying new sites to partner with or advertise on
I think Compete.com is well-suited to the user that wants to use the tools to look for related topics, keywords and niches for new ideas to get an idea of what they may be up against and where gaps and opportunities may lie.
About the Author
With more than 5 years of hands on experience in Search Engine Marketing and e-commerce for websites, Melanie possess the ability to understand the plight of today's business owners and the challenges they face in trying to get their websites not only to the top of the search engines, but to the top of their conversion game.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Very good review. Nice to have information on whether or not to spend $200 or more per month on an SEO tool. Too bad there’s no data on Canadian companies.
Yeah, that’s definitely a downfall. The weird thing is that *anyone* can participate by grabbing the toolbar and sharing their surfing habits. Therefore you’d think getting data from outside the US wouldn’t be too difficult.
What a great review of Compete Pro. Very thorough and well-organized. I’ve spent time playing with Compete.com’s free tools, but never seriously considered upgrading…until now. It’s certainly a little higher on the “tools to test” list than it was this morning.
Interesting — and very thorough — review. I just wrote a review of Compete’s methodology a couple of weeks ago and came up with completely different conclusions, so I went back and doublechecked my data. I’m still unable to make Compete produce anything even remotely close to the data I’m getting from other sources. It’s too bad, because there is a real need in the market for the types of information they provide, but they’ve gotta come up with methodology that produces accurate and consistent results before I’ll feel comfortable using their data to base business decisions on.
@catpickett I gave Melanie some of the actual statistics from my own sites with my own homegrown analytics to compare the compete data to… I know a few others did too and bottom line was, regardless of their methodology, they were fairly accurate.
>>>but they’ve gotta come up with methodology that produces accurate and consistent results
I’m curious as to what you use then? Of course this data isn’t as good as the log files from ebay.com – but I’m certainly not getting those – so what is the next best thing?
For me, in an affordable price range (a few hundred a month) I don’t see much better than Compete available. And the alternative is nothing or free keyword research tools that don’t provide the same depth or ability to search for sites getting traffic based on a keyword etc. I can personally say that in the last two weeks, this data has identified holes we’ve been filling at a profit.
Did you actually try the Pro version? After reading your post, I can’t see how anything other than log files could even come close to what you describe as an unbiased sample set.
IMHO, the data being perfect and the data being valuable are two different issues.
For example, last night, I spent three hours running three reports and came up with 46 new article topics that have search volume according to both compete and the Google keyword tool and a listing of 143 websites targeting our keywords whose backlinks we can now trace. To me? 199 dollars well spent.
@SEOAly: Definitely play around with it and let me know what you think ;)
@catpickett: I think Rae said it best with “… the data being perfect and the data being valuable are two different issues”. You just have to know how to use it and what to look for – hence the review. I tried to focus less on the hard numbers and more on the possibilities and potential.
I think its a waste of money if you are gonna buy Compete Pro. It doesn’t help.
@cipals15 doesn’t help with what? I’ve found it useful in regards to keyword research and competitive intelligence… what would you recommend as an alternative?
Very nice and detailed review there. I am just thinking of an upgrade later this month for my new client.
@rae: I have compared Compete data against logfile data from my own handful of client sites, including a major news portal. Compete makes a point to disclaim their numbers against logfile data because their measurement methodologies are completely different, but I trust my web analytics more than a vendor who won’t tell me where their numbers come from. You’re right, we don’t have access to internal web stats from the market in general, but if I can’t make Compete data match up with the analytics data I have, why would I think the numbers would be accurate for the sites I don’t have data for?
So what is the next best thing? I wish I knew. As I said earlier, there is a real need in the market for this kind of data, and there really isn’t anything else out there — at least, nothing that’s affordable for a small business. You can get statistically sound data from Nielsen//Netratings or perhaps Comscore, but it’s extremely pricey. If I could come up with a easier and more accurate way of getting this information, I’d be doing it.
>>>IMHO, the data being perfect and the data being valuable are two different issues.
You make an excellent point. If you are using the data you get from Compete to identify actionable issues (and better yet, profit from it) then there’s no doubt that it’s valuable for you. But if you’re in a situation where you have to stand behind the numbers you base your decisions on, transparency and accuracy are essential. I’m definitely going to think about this some more. For some of my sites, it may be enough to say, “Yes, the Compete numbers are different, but here’s why — and here are the interesting things we can do with them.”
Finally a great post on all the major metrics regarding Compete. I’m glad to hear a voice such as yours was also finding the interface so confusing.
Best,
Breakline