What the best and acurate way of finding out the number of UV per day/month for your competitors? Thanks.
You can try google trends and the google external keyword tool - it wont tell you specific competitor stats but it will give you an idea for the industry as a whole and search totals for keywords
Although not that accurate but still very useful, the Alexa rankings can also provide good details about the traffic specifications and points about the websites.
There's no way you could find out unless they share the analytics stats with you or reveal the traffic log. But you can still get an estimate based on Alexa ranking that will provide a rough amount of traffic that your competitors receive
alexia and other websites do give a rough idea but then that can be of no use i think the main use to read the stats is from where are the visitors coming and what are the links from where it is linked and that cannot be seen by any other person tehre are few websites whose weblizer stats can be viewed, but if that is protected then there is no way
Aside from the advice given by pdmac8 (you're right - cheeky but you never know ) there isn't a way to get it where you can be sure if you're even close (all the tools are severely limited which you can see by simply checking your own site and looking at your logs to compare) but in a pinch there are the tools noted at http://www.compete.com/ as yet another. If you use them all and compare you'll likely get a better understanding but nothing will give you a truly accurate measure. Of course - while it's nice to know how your competitors are doing the better question is, "What am I doing and how can that be increased and conversions improved."
Thanks for the replies guys. I suppose why I would like to know is - how much traffic similar content-type sites are getting more than me. My traffic isnt that great and if they are getting 10 or 100 times more traffic than me then I'll know: a) it is possible to get that kind of traffic for my niche b) i've got a lot more work to do to catch up!!! Cheers all.