Marketing Mule

There are many competitive intelligence gathering and research tools out there. Some free, such as Alexa and Compete. While others are paid, like Hitwise and Nielsen//Netratings.

And the pricing for the paid ones can range from several hundreds to many thousands of dollars, depending on the feature set you require. But does that make them better than the free systems?

A comparison between free tools and paid tools

At first glance one may think that paid tools provide more, and relevant data. In fact, if you read my recent article on Hitwise you may believe that it offers more information about a competitors site. And while it is true that it does offer more information, the question to ask yourself is: Is it useful? Useful enough to warrant the cost?

What if I told you that you could get almost the same information from an assortment of free tools and a little ingenuity?

So, let’s start with the obvious – Compete and Alexa.

I recently reviewed both Alexa (here) and Compete (here) and found that, while there were a few drawbacks to each, overall they are fairly solid, especially combined with other competitive intelligence tools such as SpyFu.

Using Compete you can easily find out about how many visitors your competitors are getting, how many visits and page views per visitor as well as the average stay per visitor.

With Alexa you can see where, geographically, visitors are coming from and where on the site they are going to. You can also learn about other domains owned in addition to your competitors domain. For example, you may know about xyz.com but they may also own uvw.com. You can also see what other domains are visited by the same people as visited your competitor’s site.

Using Spyfu you can estimate they are spending on advertising and how much traffic it is getting them. You can also see some of the terms and rank of those terms driving organic traffic to the site and what subdomains they may be using.

Using SEO For Firefox you can look at how your competitor’s site looked in the past by using Archive.org. Using Archive.org you can also learn how often they change their site and/or products and services. SEO for Firefox also gives you access to Google Trends where you can see where site visitors are coming from, not only what country but what city within a chosen country.

Using all this data you can begin to develop a fairly comprehensive profile of your competitors visitors. About the only thing missing from this mix are breakdowns by gender, age and income. But you can use more general web based statistics for that type of information, should you decide you need it.

So, now that you’ve captured all this data what do you do with it?

One thing I like to do is look at some of the terms driving traffic to the competitor’s site and compare it to my traffic for the same terms.

From there I can estimate their site’s total traffic. Granted it’s not a perfect solution, but at least it gives me an idea of where I’m at in relation to them.

From here you could review the advertising spending, to see if you can intuit anything of value – such as: are they bidding too high? Are there other keyword opportunities you could bid on that they don’t? Are their organic placement opportunities where you could competitively rank highly while they pay for a term? This type of Q &A can be achieved using Spyfu and Alexa.

Next, look at trends for some of the terms – perhaps it isn’t even worth it to bid or optimize for them, or perhaps there are overlooked opportunities.

So do you need to buy online competitive intelligence?

Again, that will depend on your needs. If you really want to know how a competitor does in relation to your site, and you don’t feel that your own estimations (as I’ve illustrated above) are accurate enough then yes perhaps you should look into services like Hitwise. Keep in mind that there is a significant cost involved, but you will get more detailed and accurate information from them.

But if you feel comfortable enough with the data you’ve gathered that you can devise an online marketing plan for the near term (for example, 3 months) then you probably don’t need to invest in paid services.