website hit rates

[panna]

hi i was wondering if anyone knew how to find out hit rates of your competitors websites

plez help

thanx

[dollybird]

I am sure there is a company called hitwise.

[SillyJokes]

try

http://www.metricsmarket.com/

for a comparison

Hitwise is good but very expensive.

[Enigma121]

try

http://www.metricsmarket.com/

for a comparison

Hitwise is good but very expensive.

Not wanting to put a dampener on things, and I'm not too sure why, but the estimate for our site is a mile off.

Can't be a very accurate tool, maybe it's a random number generator. :wink:

[Kyotee Matt]

You could always try alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com) - their stats are taken from both their search engine, and a downloadable toolbar. The stats are only really accurate for the more popular sites, so I don't know how helpful it would be to you.

[multilingual]

Alexa can only collate data from surfers who also have the Alexa toolbar installed.

They believe that 2% (roughly) of internet users have the Alexa toolbar.

So if two people click to your site, and they both have the Alexa toolbar, then they calculate that you have actually had 100 visitors.

They also don't understand unique visitors, so if one person with the Alexa toolbar visits your site 10 times a day then they put it down as 1000 visits!

Furthermore (hope you're keeping up with all this :) ) , they don't differentiate users, so..........If you have the Alexa toolbar installed, and you visit your own site 200 times per day, then Alexa will think that your site gets 10,000 visits each day!

The reason I found this out is because I have the Alexa toolbar, and when I was building my last site I was clicking on different pages hundreds of times each day for about 4 weeks.

After which I received an email from Alexa saying 'congratulations, your site is now one of the top 100,000 sites on the internet.........'

The site was 6 weeks old and hadn't even been spidered.

:shock:

Alexa and a pinch of salt are good things to take together.

:wink:

JB

[hairsoup]

hits are not a very useful metric.

If the sites your researching are limited companies, buy companies house reports where I think you can get last financial records submitted. This will give you a better idea of competition.

Even if they arent I still wouldnt rely on hits, UVs or anything like that, as it doesnt indicate relevance of the traffic, or converison rate.

You can also do some sleuthing by finding out who their suppliers are and blatantly asking how much business they are doing with them. Ive never met a rep/distributor who doesnt happily part with that sort of information.

[SillyJokes]

try

http://www.metricsmarket.com/

for a comparison

Hitwise is good but very expensive.

Not wanting to put a dampener on things, and I'm not too sure why, but the estimate for our site is a mile off.

Can't be a very accurate tool, maybe it's a random number generator. :wink:

From the Metricsmarket site

The results shown above are collected from a sample of over 2 million users. They are usually accurate to within 5-15% of real traffic, however some anomalies may happen which can reduce the accuracy.
Comparing with your own web statistics
These figures will usually not directly correlate with web server logs as they do not include visits from search engine spiders/crawlers, monitoring services or cached hits.

Usually your web server logs will indicate more unique visitors than we do and a number in between will likely be the truer figure.

I just find it a useful indicator and it's not bad for comparing.

What do you wnat for free? You'd pay hunderds if not thousands for Hitwise.

[MichaelG]

http://www.metricsmarket.com/

Looks like its a hit & miss tool.

[duenna]

All very good advice. But!!!

Why not see where they are in relation to your website in the search engines?

If they are truly comeptitors, then you have some things to consider. If they are higher than you in the search engine result pages and have a higher PR (not necessarily important) then you need to rectify the situation with your own website. Are they doing PPC? are you?

I would be concerned with my own website traffic and positions first. Forget about them (your competitors!) for the time being, you are after all, better than them.

Good luck