2 questions, How can I market better than my competition? & How can I find out how many hits or page views or traffic sources of my competitors?
I don't think you can find traffic hit info other than alexa.com, but that is not very accurate. I know there is keywordspy dot com and spyfu dot com for adwords spying.
You can't really find out where their traffic comes from but you can search for various keywords and see how they rank and check their backlinks.
Check their backlinks and find out where do they have the most backlinks. Also check their keywords and where they rank in that keywords.
in google search type link:domain.com (replacing domain.com with the actul domain you are searching). This will tell you how many backlinks there are in google. As far as Alexa, you can go to alexa.com and search for the domain and if they have a record of it it will give you statistics of what they have.
in order to get a glimpse of all their back links you should use the yahoo site explorer you can see all the backlinks that way
If you have more money then your competition then you could easily market better by buying hits at those ppc sites. If you don't have the money then you will have to wait until search engine indexed your site. In the mean while you should do your daily SEO.
I like quantcast. I don't know if they are that accurate, but they list the demographic (gender, ethnicity, income, education), and where that demographic visits on the web if they visit your competitor. Try www.quantcast.com.
I'll second that, quantcast is great, not 100% accurate but the demographics are a very important part of knowing WHO the people are you are marketing to. i.e how many of them are male for example (or vice versa), which country they are from and also which other websites they visit!
You can go to http://marketleap.com and compare link popularity with your competition. You can also check where your competition is getting their backlinks.