Compete.com has had a great platform for some time, and they’ve been very supportive to the blogger community and open to ideas I’ve floated to Compete over the last 3 years – so I want to round off this year and decade with a thankful post, to Compete.com and some of the newer features they provided (and in February 10, there will be more, I suspect, some which I’ve influenced).

Paid Search Traffic reporting – only available in Compete PRO – allows the comparison of paid search referrals between one or two websites as far back as two years and I find it very useful, and fairly accurate, based on my own experience of using it on sites whose analytics I had access to, including Paid Search traffic.

Compete comparison of paid search traffic betweet Met Museum and MoMA

Lately, as part of a Social Media Audit of a client sites and their competitors – Organic Search rankings AND Paid Search traffic have become relevant additions to the Audit – but getting the Paid Search Traffic has been difficult – using tools like SpyFu, it was possible to estimate campaigns, to some extent – but Compete’s PRO Paid Search solution is the best overall offering – especially as this shows the spending habits, overall and down to the keyword level using Compete’s intelligent filters (see below).

I picked the Metropolitan Museum and MOMA because they are not clients of mine – one can never be too careful about writing about sites where there is a paid connection – best to avoid it – even when the information is positive and useful – as it’s not always taken that way,  er … nuff said.

Getting the amount of Social Media Traffic is made easy by Compete’s filter for it – though they do not, as yet, allow us to compare traffic between two sites specifically on Social Media – it’s easy enough to get the same information – and that’s useful to chart progress in Social Media campaigns – an additional improvement would be to include trending lines going back 2 years, like they do for Web Traffic and Paid Search traffic, etc.

While the traffic information you get from Compete PRO isn’t as accurate as what you could get from site analytics, when it’s properly set up, the ability to get readings on competitors, more than makes up for it.

Another part of Compete that comes in handy, at times, is the Industry Profiles – I have access to some of them and, when dealing with client sites, for example, as part of PR, Social Media or Search Audit, it can be very useful to see how a site compares with it’s own industry (when a site is categorized – which, in many cases, it still not).

Here’s a Industry Profile of the Dating Social Network segment up through November 09.

You can see the individual rankings of the 269 sites currently categorized in this category by Compete (note: you can not, currently, categorize sites, yourself – but you can request that a particular site that is currently not in any category, be added to a specific category).

Overall, there’s a lot to like about Compete.com’s search and referral offerings and I’m looking forward to the next update, soon, as the platform keeps getting better and better.