Hitwise has one of, if not the best, set of tools to measure multichannel marketing campaigns vs. your competitors campaigns.

The chart above is an example of an offline promotions (catalog mailing) that impacted online behaviour (visits to the website). Debenhams, which experienced a tremendous lift in visits in conjunction with the "Debenham’s Spectacular" before Christmas last year. Visits to Debenhams spiked the week to the 19th of November, earlier than the Apparel and Accessories category. Visits more than doubled in one week for Debenhams. Offline and in-store promotions for the Spectacular had a direct impact on visits.

Without a tool like HitWise it would really be next to impossible to measure the impact a business campaign has vs your competitors.

If all you wanted to know is how much the a catalog or brochure mailing affected visits to your website you would not need HitWise (a little planning and your own back end analytics would provide the information).  However, if you wanted to know how much your campaign affected sales compared to the rest of the industries in your segment - then your own web analytics would not be able to answer that question.

It reminds me of one of my architectual house plan clients who wanted to know how much traffic goes from their site to other leaders in the architectual house plan segment such as eplans.com and globalhouseplans.com.   

I don’t know of any analytics platform that will tell you where visitors go after they leave your site and no web analytics will tell you were your competitiors traffic came and went (or how much traffic they got) except HitWise (and their data is still an estimate or sample - but it’s much closer than anything else you can get).

Here’s an example showing the ClickStream Analysis of houseplans.com that’s very relevent for certain of my clients.

Such a chart would be next to impossible to produce without HitWise.  Assuming you were eplans.com and you wanted to know how much traffic homeplans.com got from search vs other site you compete with there’s really no other viable service that can give you an estimation of that clickstrem.  

In the clickstream above, you can see that homeplans.com traffic from search engines in 2005 was ~30% (if we add up all the search engine traffic) and many visitors were coming from other sites (in many cases, competitiors) like house-floor-plans.com and eplans.com.   

After they went to houseplans.com where did they go (this is what my client wants to know about their own site)?   Easy as pie if you have Hitwise…..they went to compare plans on 4 of the other top house plan sites (homeplans.com, coolhouseplans.com, dreamhomesource.com and eplans.com) - actually the order matches the ranking these sites tend to have in Google for popular house plan terms.   Also, when some just went back to the search engines to search again.

I would suggest if the information presented above is important enough to have - go out and get HitWise (it’s expensive but businesses that need this kind of information can afford the product).