Tag Archives: analysis

Compete.com: Compare Your Site With the Competition

Feb 11, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 3 Comments

Have you ever wondered how your site stacks up against its competitors? Most people don’t make their traffic stats available to the general public, though doing so can attract advertisers…

That’s what Compete.com is for. They use some secret methods to estimate site traffic, and allow you to compare sites against each other. It’s accuracy is pretty good too. I compared a graph of Webmaster-Source’s unique vistors over the course of a year with the same time frame from Google Analytics. The results were close enough.

It’s dead-easy to use Compete. Just input your domain and a competitors’ or two. You get a graph like this back:

Compete.com Graph of Webmaster-Source and Pro Blog Design

The default graph shows unique visitors over a period of one year. You cna switch it to pages per visit, “attention,” average stay, or if you pay for premium service, pageviews. It also offers some other interesting figures, such as high-traffic search keywords and growth. You can embed graphs on your website too, such as on an “Advertise Here” page.

It’s on, Michael. :)

Traffic Sources: Where Are Your Visitors Coming From?

May 5, 2008 by Matt | Posted in General No Comments

Check your blog’s statistics. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they mainly typing-in your blog’s URL, coming from search engine results pages (SERPs), or are they being referred to you from other sites?

Google Analytics puts an overview of this information on their dashboard, and offers more detailed data on a separate page.

The Traffic Sources chart on the Analytics Dashboard provides some valuable insight on your readers, and how they view your blog.

What do the numbers mean?

  • Referring Sites, er, refers to how many unique visitors came from other sites. E.g. blogs linking to you, traffic from social bookmarking sites.
  • Search Engines – the traffic coming from SERPs.
  • Direct Traffic – People who manually typed your domain in.

Direct Traffic is mainly composed of the people who visit your site frequently. This includes RSS subscribers manually visiting your sites, as well as links clicked from desktop RSS aggregators.

Referring Sites means “pretty much anything coming from another domain.” This includes social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, links clicked from web-based RSS aggregators, and links from other blogs.

Optimally, you want to have a significant amount of direct traffic, signifying loyal readers, plenty of referrals, and some steady traffic from search engines. The ratios between the percentages depends on many factors, such as your niche. If there are a lot of blogs in your niche, you may have a lot of referrals. The same goes for if your site is popular among the StumbleUpon and Digg crowd. Smaller niches may have more traffic from search engines than referrals.

How are your blog’s traffic sources proportioned?