7 Secret Ways to Know How Your Rivals Use the Web

Digital intelligence is a new business domain for companies that strive to collect, analyze, and use market data for competitive gains.

By Rakesh Raman

Call it the corporate curiosity or enterprise espionage, the need to peep into your competitors’ activities is more crying than ever before in today’s cutthroat business world.

When most businesses are going digital and operate openly on the Web, the greed to know about others has suddenly increased among the corporates.

Digital intelligence is thus a new business domain for companies that strive to collect, analyze, and use market data for competitive gains.

Most would think it’s easier now to know about their rivals because their information is available on the Web. But it’s not that easy to know a brand’s performance and popularity from its website alone.

However, there are some Web tools available that can give you a relative idea about the external interaction with a website – your own as well as that of your competitors.

While built-in software tools and plug-ins like Google Analytics, Webstat, or Awstats are password-protected by the site owners, outsiders can’t get an access to data delivered by these tools. You can, however, use the following 7 Web services that are available for all to try and use.

Warning: All the Web analytic tools are too crude. So, don’t expect them to give you the accurate data about any Web activity. You need to apply qualitative analysis techniques to draw useful inferences for your business needs.

Here we go. The 7 secret Web measurement tools:

1. Alexa

Most would have heard about this service run by the Web major, Amazon. Alexa claims to provide actionable analytics for the Web. You simply have to enter a website address in the “Enter a site” box and it will instantly show you the global as well as local rank of the site in terms of its popularity.

Among many other parameters such as bounce rate, daily pageviews, and daily time by visitors on the site, it allows you to compare multiple sites.

2. Traffic Estimate

If you want information about your site and that of your competitors from another source, you can try Traffic Estimate. This service also gives you the number of site visits and other Web analytics for a site.

Enter the site address exactly as it says and you will get the number of visits on a site in the past 30 days. As visits include multiple visits from the same user, this parameter is different from unique visits. But it will give you a comparative rating of a site’s popularity.

3. 1Page Rank

This is a very useful and comprehensive service, though like others it may also not be accurate. Along with other stats such as daily unique visitors and daily pageviews on a site, 1Page Rank gives you the rank of the site determined by its own algorithm.

Plus, you can even know the monetary worth of a site and its social media performance in terms of Facebook Likes, Facebook shares, Tweets, Linkedin shares, and so on.

4. Compete

Offering digital marketing optimization solutions, Compete gives you the number of unique visitors during a month and the rank of a site.

It also lets you know the source of Web traffic on a site. You can compare a particular site with others. Although the basic Compete service is free of charge, you will have pay for its PRO version if you want detailed domain reports.

5. Similar Web

Positioned as a free and advanced Web analytic tool, Similar Web allows you to compare website traffic stats for different sites. This is also a very useful service, which gives you the global rank, country rank, and category rank of a site.

Moreover, you can know the estimated visits, time spent on a site, pageviews, bounce rate, and so on for a particular site while comparing it with your competitors.

6. Popuri

You can check the popularity of a site, its rank, links, and social media data with Popuri. It also gives you the trust parameters of a site including reliability, privacy protection, and child safety indicators.

You can know the popularity of a site on different social media properties such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. You also can get visitors data on the site from different countries.

7. Marketing Grader

It’s a also a free website review tool that provides you the information on the marketing effectiveness of a site. Marketing Grader, which is a popular service, measures the performance of site in terms of its blogging capability, social media presence, search engine optimization (SEO), lead generation capability, and mobile optimization.

Most of the Web monitoring services have their free as well as paid versions. You should opt for paid service only if your need is not satisfied with the free option. And some services will refuse to provide data about a website if the traffic is not sufficient on the site. But that’s okay. You’d never like to monitor a dead site.

As Web is an ocean of information, there is no dearth of free and paid tools to carry out each and every task. You can, however, begin with the online services described above to monitor your own as well as your rivals’ Web properties.

By Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of RMN Company.