I’m excited that an IDEA I gave to Compete.com almost 18 months ago (or more) is now reality – it’s called Compete.com’s Traffic Dashboard and I was, as I understand it, the first to think of it and ask for it.

While smaller sites such as my own Webmetricsguru.com blog are not supplying enough traffic to generate this “map” most larger sites do – and you can drill down.

True, the information for the most part was part of their reports – but I lobbied for categorization way back and Compete.com listened – boy did they listen!

Btw, for any of my readers who are in NYC, I’m speaking at Colubmia tonight – join me there.

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.

Recently , Compete.com released it’s Industry and Behavioral Category Profiles (see Compete Pro Enterprise adds Categories!) , which I just got access to yesterday so I could get a first hand look.   My first impression is they remind me a lot of ComScore’s MyMetrix platform.

I looked at the Web Analytics Industry Profile first:

What the chart tells me is that traffic (Unique Visitors) is going significantly Y2Y (+31%) and, in the performance tab, you get average stay, average visits and average pageviews per visit for the entire category.  What’s valuable to me, first off, is that you can compare any company on the list in a category, to the average, for that category, which is helpful in finding deficiencies and strengths.

You can also look at keywords used most by the Industry Category (see below)

I haven’t figured out yet how to apply this information.  One thing, which I’ll cover with my contacts at Compete.com next week, is how this information is best used.   While companies are assigned a Industry Category, it would be nice if Compete.com had a way of categorizing any site you enter into it.

More to come, as I come to understand Compete.com’s new Category Profile offerings.