Tracking Traffic

I use compete.com to estimate traffic to competitor sites. It gives me a ball park as to what they are receiving.

Is there any site that provides a bit more detail about traffic to competitor sites such as estimates to what they are receiving directly, via search engines, via referrals.

I figure sites such as compete.com have this information because they have surfers install toolbars and can track internet patterns based on this, I'm just not sure if they are willing to share this information.

 

Thats too much of private data to be shared. I would sue a company if they share that kind of information with anybody. Just my 2 cents

 

crazy to see how easy you can know how many people use a site...ANY

 

I am amazed that such information could be made available. Are you saying that you can get, even in a general sense, traffic figures from another site using compete.com? Personally I wouldn't think a site's traffic should be anyone else's business, but then who knows, from a marketing standpoint, someone getting great numbers probably would be happy to let everyone know.

 

I'm not sure how it would stand up in court, compete would simply say that they are releasing the stats of the users that have downloaded their toolbar and by agreeing to the TOS, have agreed to have their traffic patterns released.

Thing is though, so far I'm not aware of any site that goes into that much detail but it would be nice to have access to this data.

 

try quantcast, they have some good info available

 

What is the validity of such data. Do you think it is genuine? In general I estimate traffic purely by keyword volume tools. I think it will provide pretty much the same information but in an indirect manner. Search engine statistics I believe are private to each website. I think tools like this could be checking the sites keywords and estimating traffic to the website based on the websites ranking for its keywords and the popularity of those keywords. Every sites search engine or other traffic statistics is in private protected areas of the server so I don't think they can get access to it.

 

I also 2nd quantcast

 

I posted this comment this morning in another thread, but I discovered quantcast this week. It's pretty sweet.

I have a sense that the numbers they provide are pretty good.

 

Hitwise is a pretty good one from what I've seen. I don't know how they were getting their data, but when I was working at Bodog we used it alot and the stats they gave us about our own sites seemed fairly close, so we figured the stats they showed for competitor sites was fairly close as well (I'd say about 75-80% accuracy on their data).