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 million Unique Visitors a month for similar metrics you can use ComScore and trust the data. If you get less than one million Unique Visitors a month you are better off with HitWise."

Most of my clients, save my employer, would fall under HitWise rather than ComScore.  However, as an SEO Specialist who has several clients, both HitWise and ComScore are too expensive for me though I’d love to have HitWise’s full database to work with (I know I could come up with some insight that would blow people away - really believe that.  I would never subscribe to ComScore, but do follow their various snippets of data that come to me through professional publications).  Avinash gives the reasons why HitWise is a better choice for sites with under 1 million uniques:

"The reason is simple: Each service uses its ok statistical computation and aggregations to approximate “representative” all world internet usage. There is a much higher probability of error for smaller sites, less than a million, due to these statistics and weighting as they are applied to show “real world behavior”. You are better off with the HitWise sample of millions of visitors than the ComScore sample of hundreds of thousands."

However, there are some people who buy HitWise and simply don’t use it enough to justify the price (HitWise is expensive as tools go).

I have posted portions of my Competitive Analysis of an Online Tattoo Site on Webmetricsguru.com, in case anyone wants to take a look I can send them a copy of the whole thing, as long as the don’t distribute or in any way copy it.

Here’s the specific links to posts about my work with Competition Analysis and GeoDemographics

Using MSN Ad Center to gauge Target Audiences

MSN Ad Center -Finding the Cluster Segment of your Target Audiences

MSN AdCenter - Finding the Audiences for a Keyword Phrase  Do searchers over 50 years old buy Tattoos online? I gathered this info using MSN AdCenter - it was pure keyword research - nothing else.

Finding the best Geo-Demographic for a Keyword Phase  I’d look at this one as it’s got one of the most innovative charts in it - I consider it one of my best intuitive jumps connecting information as it currently exists and what AdCenter should be presenting to us in the future.

Google AdWords Demograhic Targeting - Part 2  Google’s platform is good, but not as good yet as MSN AdCenter - in fact, it’s not even doing the same thing.

Chat at The Workshop Resource Center on BUZZ from SESNY06  I covered the BUZZ from SESNY06 that I attended several weeks ago - I give Chats at the World Resource Center once or twice a month.

Measuring Web Traffic - Part II

Who is online - Measuring Web Traffic - Part III

PPC Engines & Programs - Part 1 - MSN’s Jed Nahum  I spoke with Jed Nahum briefly after the PPC Engine and Programs session at WMW last week.  Sent Jed a copy of my Competitive Analysis of Online Tattoo sites using MSN AdCenter.    Here’s the reply I got back from Jed