Compete.com in Ratings and Reviews

Each month we take a look at a website, book, whitepaper, or piece of software to help you decide if it’s worth your hard-earned (marketing) dollars.

We’ve become big fans of a number of competitive stat sites here at Tippingpoint Labs, and Compete.com is one of our favorites. Compete offers a nice set of tools for free, so let’s take a look at what a paid membership on Compete will deliver.

What Is Compete.com?

Compete.com is a site that allows users to input the URLs of up to 5 sites and compare their traffic metrics. The idea is that you can analyze your competitors’ traffic data and adjust your advertising, content, and SEO strategies accordingly. Compete offers a free version as well as a number of subscription models, so see what each one has to offer.

Compete.com for Free

Registered users can compare the compete rank, total visits and unique visitor metrics going back one year for up to 5 sites (domains or subdomains) at a time. The data can be saved in a “Portfolio” (think saved search) and exported as a spreadsheet, graph image, or permalink. Monthly and yearly change, top referral sites, top destination sites, and top tags are also provided for each site referenced.

Free Summary

The free version can provide a pretty decent look into your competition’s traffic and their top 5 referrers. If you are using Compete.com to analyze sites for advertising or content placement potential, the ability to compare traffic is handy. Looking back one year is usually enough, so the pay models’ two years of data will probably not benefit most users.

The biggest free value from Compete.com is the Compete.com blog. The posts are insightful and topical, and they will provide ample insight for the new user looking to understand how to leverage Compete.com data in marketing decision making.

Compete.com for Pay

Compete.com currently offers four levels of pay membership: Intro ($199/month), Standard ($299/month), Advanced ($499/month), and Enterprise ($1,500/month). Intro allow 50 analytics reports each month, Standard 100, Advanced 250, and Enterprise is unlimited.

All pay subscriptions offer a number of great additional features. Daily digests are email alerts that keep you updated on your Compete.com account (think Google Alerts). Engagement metrics are available in addition to the compete rank, total visits, and unique visitors metrics. Page views, average stay, visits per person, attention (the estimated percentage of their online time users spend with a given site), daily attention, and daily reach (percentage of all U.S. Internet users who visited the site today) are made available. This data is available 2 years back instead of the 1 year in the free version.

All subscriptions also all offer ranked lists in different quantities (from the top 200 sites for Standard up to 15,000 for the Enterprise subscription). Compete.com’s ranked lists “Provide lists of the most popular sites across the Internet, ranked by any metric available on compete.com. Use Compete Ranked Lists to better judge your site’s Web presence in the context of its peers, find new domains to partner with or analyze Internet trends on a macro level.”

A Standard subscription adds pay vs. natural (organic) search results. The Advanced subscription adds Referral Analytics reports, which provide additional data on non-search traffic to and from a given site. Only the top 5 referrers are available on subscriptions below the Advanced level.

An Enterprise subscription includes all features of the lesser subscriptions as well as unlimited logins, access to experimental pre-release beta metrics, and premium customer support.

Pay Summary

The Daily Digests and engagement metrics are the real reason to pay for the Intro subscription. The ranked lists are nice but will probably not be useful on a daily or even monthly basis. It’s nice to take a look at where you or your competitors rank, but I can’t image that this is something you’ll get value from frequently.

The paid vs. organic search results available in the Standard subscription are a must-have for anyone spending on SEO and SEM.

One thing that both the free and pay versions are missing is demographics data. Pairing the free or subscription version of Compete.com with a site like Quantcast will give you both the traffic data and demographic insight required to get a complete understanding of a site. Our suggestion would be to play with the free version first, then sign up for a month or so with the Intro or Standard subscripion to see how much value you can pull out and whether or not you can put that data into action.

About the author

Brett Virmalo -

As a creative director at Tippingpoint Labs, Brett leads a team deploying ecommerce and content marketing solutions for global B2B and consumer clients.

Brett has worked with clients including PG&E, Kodak, American Express, TomTom, Putnam Investments, and most recently, Breville. He has been with Tippingpoint Labs since 2003 serving as a designer, developer, art director, and now creative director.