Come for the Ride!

Unlike analytics, (data about your own site) competitive intelligence is data about your competitors. Unfortunately, to get an accurate data set that you can rely on, tons and tons of data points have to be collected. Because collecting ISP data and hiring sample users ain’t easy, the companies that do the work usually charge a ton for the service.

When you think of competitive intelligence, a few large companies probably comes to mind: ComScore, Nielson and Hitwise. Each one of these companies charge $25k – $50k a year for their subscription and for the record, they all count traffic in slightly different ways.

So what’s a poor startup to do when you want to compete with the big boys but don’t have the same resources? Alexa? No, Alexa is a joke inaccurate… so what else?

As the web moves to web 2.0, luckily there are companies out there that are now offering cheaper solutions that are just as accurate. While these services may not give you as many ways to break down the data as the larger services, they do provide a solid foundation to size up your competitors.

The site I used the most is Compete.com. Similar to Alexa, you have the option to compare up to three to five sites on visits, uniques and some other data points. Although the service doesn’t offer too many options, the basic free options are what most advertisers use on the expensive services.

A new service I found that offers a lot more data points than Compete.com is Quantcast.com.  Though I’m not completely sure how accurate the data is compared with  other services, the amount of free information here does warrant a visit if you are doing any kind of competitive analysis.  So far my research using Quantcast on some of the bigger sites yielded expected results.  For smaller sites, I haven’t had a chance to verify the accuracy of the results.

However, for those of you who want to size up your competitors, definitely check out the above two sites and see what you can find.