Let's say you wanted to monitor another website (not your own) and you don't have access to their logs or analytics data. There are a number of tools (for free!) that would let you benchmark their performance. While there is a lot of fudge factor in their accuracy, you can still get a rough idea about what the competition is doing.
Check out their website traffic
Let's
say you're the nurse's association, which occasionally has conflicts
with the American Medical Association, and you want to see if traffic
to their site is rising during a time of legislative conflict. Check
out compete.com,
which estimates website traffic from a sample of two million users and
combines it with mathematical models to create estimations. The more
popular the site is, the more likely compete.com will be able to give
you a good estimate.
Check out their Google searches
Here's
another great technique. If a competitor has a new or unique domain
name or issue, news coverage will drive searches for them in Google.
Correspondingly, you can then go to Google a week later and see how
popular they were using Google Insights for Search.
Here I've pulled the data about Mike Morgan's goldmansachs666.com
website, which shows that he's losing public interest after his launch.
Check out their Google results
Another
great way is to actually see how well someone is ranking for a key
search term (or terms) in Google. You can do this manually, but typing
in the search terms and counting their rank, or you can pick up the
RankChecker Firefox plugin, which will let you automate this process.
Here I've examined how well goldmansachs666.com is ranking on a few
terms, "goldman sachs", "financial fraud", "wall street", and "bank
bailout": It will query Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, and other engine,
but I've just shown it's Google results here:
Goldman Sachs PR is hoping they don't climb from 24 to 10, but given their declining popularity, that's not likely.
Note that Google results vary from place to place, and even from datacenter to datacenter. These estimates can change slightly simply by re-googling.
Check out their search engine advertising budget
Another
inexact but useful tool is one of the many "keyword monitoring"
products that purport to show you what your competition is spending on
keywords. Here I've used keywordspy.com to show a rough approximation
for what earthshare.org is spending it's Google Grant AdWords money
on. (I know what they're actually spending their money on, and I can
tell you this is 80% accurate.)
If you're interested in running an ongoing benchmarking against your competitors, or doing a one-time analysis to see where you stand, please give me a call at 415-683-7526.
Disclosure: EarthShare is a current client of Virilion.
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