I’m liking what I’ve read about Compete.com Referral Analytics offering that went live last month – there was a webinar that took place about 10 days ago conducted by Compete.com’s Product Manager, Eric Austrew, (I missed it) that describes what you can do with the Referral Analytics offering including the new Traffic Dashboard.

I also want to say, again, Compete’s Referral Analytics Traffic Dashboard was first born as an idea almost two years ago in a coversation I had with Eric Austrew where I suggested Compete.com had the potential to improve quite a bit by adding categorization (similar to what Comscore has).

About 3 months ago, at SES NY, Eric Austrew meet with me for about 30 minutes and described Referral Analytics Traffic Dashboard and credited me as one of the first ones (or the first one) to come up with the idea, though others asked for it as well.

With that in mind, I’m particularly happy to read certain articles such as those cited in the Compete Blog about the Traffic Dashboard on Compete Competitive Analysis Tool Turns Marketers Into 007-esque Double Analytics Agents.   That’s something I’d truly want to have inspired.

Perhaps the reason I bring this up at all – is to highlight a role in influencing, positively, how analytics develops.   In a way, analytics evangelist Avanish Kaushik has influenced how Google Analytics dashboarding has evolved – his hand is in a lot of the improvements that have taken place over the last 3 years in Google Analytics.

In the Social Media Monitoring realm – I’ve had access to many of the best tools and platforms – and I’ve had opportunities to help shape them – Compete’s Traffic Dashboard was an example of one of those times where that happened.

Here’s Compete.com instructions on how to read the Traffic Dashboard:

How do I read the “Channel Map”?

Open FAQsWhere does the data come from ?

Compete’s Channel Map is a unique visualization tool that can help you explore and discover traffic composition and aquisition opportunities at-a-glance.

The Channel Map lets you look at hundreds of traffic sources to a site or category in one view, and will help you understand what exactly is driving the change and makeup of a site’s traffic.
Colored Rectangles

Each colored rectangle represents Categories or individual sites if you zoom in. The rectangle’s size is representative of the number of referrals a referring site or category sent to the site you searched for. If the rectangle is green, it means the relative size (referral share) has increased over the past month. If the rectangle is red, it means the relative size (referral share) has decreased over the past month. If the rectangle is striped, it means the referring site or category is “new” for this month and its month of month growth is infinity.

Mouse over an individual rectangle and you can see information such as the total number of referrals, change in referral share, change in absolute referrals.

Two Levels:

Category Referrals: The default view of the channel map shows you aggregated traffic from Compete’s Industry Groups and Categories. This way you can see what large channels and their constituent categories are moving site traffic. This can help you answer questions like, “how does Coupon traffic compare to Search? Which is driving more traffic? Which is increasing or decreasing share?”

Site Referrals: Click on a Category and the Map will zoom in to give you a relative view of the sites within that category. This can help you answer questions like, “what specific social sites are making my Social traffic drop?”

Traffic Details:

The Chart below the map refreshes when you click on a site or a category to show you the actual contribution of the top and bottom contributors to the referral change for the month. For instance, is Search traffic decreased by 50,000, this chart will show you what sites contributed to the increase or decrease for that month. In other words, you can see the exact sites most responsible for driving the change in traffic for individual categories without having to guess.

Click to Zoom:

Need to explore the sites within a Category? Simply click the category box and the chart will zoom. To go back, either reclick within the chart, or use the breadcrumbs above.

Link to the Data Table:

The Channel Map can help you explore an discover traffic trends and relationships, but if you really need a data table, simply click over to the Traffic Details tab to see referrals in a grid. Here you can manipulate referral sources in a Flat View, or a Grouped View organized around a parent domain when there are categorized subdomains.