Compete.com keeps getting better and better – did you know Compete Now Offers Audience Insights! You can get the information on most of the larger sites but not on very small websites where there isn’t enough information.  You can also get Audience breakdowns by demographics according to the Compete.com blog:

..Compete Audience Profiles are available to anyone with a free MyCompete account on compete.com. See an example of some of the attributes you’ll see when using Compete Audience Profiles below.

However, in order to get Audience Profile data to show up each website that wants it must claim ownership and place a JavaScript sending data to Compete.com so it can capture this information -and it just might be worth doing and seems to overlap some of what Quantcast does by collecting much of the same information.

You can read about the details in the Compete Now Offers Audience Insights! post but rather than repeat the same information they offered, I’m going to use Compete to look at something different, like proving a Social Media casestudy works or not – not sure the information is granular enough though.

But the Demographics and Age-Income information is good enough to tell us something about Twitter

The early adopters who used Twitter had more money – but as time has gone on, Twitter is going mainstream and this chart above shows it (though the ages of Twitter users didn’t change much over the last two years).

I generally use tools like Compete to confirm or deny assumptions or hypothesis that I have.    If it’s just about driving attention to a site, the daily attention and daily time spent are better – but if your looking to see how changes you have made have broadly changed your audience, Compete is you friend – and a better friend than Comscore – which is much, much more expensive – but doesn’t offer much more in this respect.

If Compete were to offer their Industry and Behavioral profiles to everyone AND cover the entire world, they’d have, more or less, the same thing as Comscore MyMetrix – but they would need a lot more granularity.

It just goes to show that the bar keeps getting higher – and Comscore and Nielsen ought to be happy they have companies like Compete and Quantcast to keep them innovating and getting better – because if they didn’t,  there would not be much value in Comscore or Nielsen, which is more focused on paid advertising, anyway.

But, as I wrote a few years ago, the value of all these tools, Compete, Quantcast, Comscore, Nielsen, etc, is to foster conversations in a safe way between brands and competitors – they should not be taken as absolute truths – more as trending tools for insight.

Anyhow, Great job for Compete – they continue to raise the bar – and I’m looking forward to the next release which I understand was going to be next month.

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.