Spy on your competition in five minutes! Using three free tools available on the web, it is possible to quickly do competitive research and discover insightful information. Find your competitor's monthly visits, average page views, organic rankings, pay per click budgets, and pay per click search terms, and more, simply by knowing your competitor's URL and entering it into these tools!
Tool #1 â Quantcast
Quantcast, while originally designed for advertisers and publishers, is a great tool to find out information regarding the visitors to your competitor's website. Enter the competitor's domain and press "Go." Quantcast visitor information includes number of monthly visitors and demographic information such as gender, age, presence of children in the household, income, ethnicity, and education. For more information on how to interpret the Quantcast data, read here (article gone).
Tool #2 â Compete
When you first visit Compete, enter your competitor's URL and hit the button “Get Site SnapShot.” The Compete SnapShot returns several metrics related to your competitor's site. Similar to Quantcast, Compete also offers an estimate of the monthly visitors to the website. Compete data also includes statistics on pages per visit and average stay (or the number of minutes the average person spends on the site). For some websites, the “More Site Information” section may include data as to whether or not the site is “Trusted,” meaning it has been validated by GeoTrust and it has an “extensive site history” and may list current deals being offered by the website. For more information about the Compete SnapShot, click here.
Tool #3 â Spyfu
Spyfu is a fantastic tool, especially if your competition is engaged in Pay Per Click advertising. Enter your competitor's domain and hit search. Spyfu returns data not only on organic search terms and rankings and that website's organic competitors but also a wealth of PPC data as well. Spyfu can provide you with your competitor's paid search terms and positions (as well as paid competitors) and other helpful estimates such as daily ad budget, clicks/day, average cost/click, average clicks/day, average ad position, average number of competitors for an ad, etc. Spyfu data can be very helpful in planning your own PPC campaign strategy.
The most important things about all of these tools â they are easy to use, accessible, and best of all, they're FREE! So, what are you waiting for â get out there and find out what the competition is doing!
