I had a nice long conversation with my friends at Compete.com today about an upcoming new enhancement to their platform that is launching on April 15th; it was also a good brainstorming session where I gave Compete  some ideas they’ll, hopefully, be rolling into future releases, as they can.

I don’t have the screen shots of the demo they gave me today, but they improved the way information is presented, allowed more in-depth deep dives of the Compete data and some Social Tagging features leveraging users of Compete to tag sites, which would then be used as a form of identification and categorization.

I pointed out, however, that even though tagging sites is an attractive feature, I seriously doubt there would be much incentive to do so, unless something was offered in return for the effort given.   There’s a good chance that, down the line, users of Compete will be able to earn points by tagging sites that can be redeemed for more high end access to the platform that subscribers currently pay for.

And that brings up an interesting point – up to now Analytics platforms have, in general, wanted customers to pay up front, and often, by usage, but there are features being rolled out, like tagging enhancements to Compete … or ….. sentiment analysis in Radian6, for example, that hard to get people to do often enough to be useful at this point – but with a Freenium account that can be upgraded with some credits for doing these things, it’s viable that those tasks would get done much more often, to everyone’s benefit.

I predict using incentives and credits to get people to do things (that essentially help everyone) will become more common.

Anyway, I’ll have more to say about Compete’s new offerings next week when they are launched and I can play with them.

Compete.com launched their new Search Analytics product and my original post – which I've now amended, was harsh and critical – but I didn't have the whole story (nor was it communicated till a week later)

However, here's story I've received today – and as I'll now have access to the entire toolset , I can evaluate it – and I'll write about it in a couple of days; meanwhile, this is the information I've been given by Compete – which I'll evaluate:

While the front end of Compete Pro doesn’t look like much of a change, it represents a MASSIVE reworking of our backend, specifically in member management. I won’t bore you with details, but the fact that you ended up with no credits was actually a result of your inclusion in a list of folks slated to get enhanced access, and a miscommunication on how this was going to get done. Having found out about the hiccup this morning, I’m currently in the process of getting this in place (though your access is currently available).

Couple points I want to address on your post:

Compete Taking away everyone’s credits: With the move to a subscription model, credits had to be converted into Pro access. We did this conversion based on the number of credits each member had at the time of launch, and gave substantially more value away than people purchased. As a matter of fact, even non-paying members with at least 1 credit were given a free month of Compete Pro. For paying members, we typically gave around 10X the value of their credits.

Minimal announcements: Because of the timing of our launch, and the fact that we are rolling out additional tools very soon after launch, we decided to hold off on aggressive promotion until later on in July. However, starting in May, we were informing our members about the transition, and let all of our paying members what the transition meant for them well before launch.

Pricing: Compete Pro is about 10% of where we plan on going by years end. Instead of ramping up pricing as we add more features, we will be adding increasing functionality at every plan level throughout the year. I’m sure that you’re view of our pricing will be dramatically different by the end of the year, as we will be adding more metrics, and stronger data than competitors changing 10x our prices. Just a few of the things slated for inclusion in the coming months:

• Paid/natural search breakouts
• Referral/destination sources (i.e how are people getting to a site, and where are they going when the leave)
• Robust ranked lists (such as search related lists, rankings by category, sub-domain inclusions)
• Sub-domain data