Forum Moderators: DixonJones
What are yours? Are they what they should be or not?
It cost me $ x.xx to earn $ y.yy is the basic statistic you need.
Market share is only important to those realatively few companies hold a significant share of their market.
If you are a retailer and you are K-Mart or Sears perhaps those numbers mean something.
If you are a retailer on the Internet, your share is probably below a percent of the total market in the US and even less within the entire world.
The focus is wrong. You need to be looking at your sales, cost of sales and return on investment. Knowing that you sold .0025% within your market and some other retailer sold .0027% doesn't mean anything.
What is his cost of sales v yours. What is his return on his advertising investment v yours. If you are selling over the Internet, it is hard for me see how you would be selling head-to-head against a competitor.
Of course, you don't need the traffic statistics of competing sites to tackle any of those issues.
If I were selling hot dogs from a push cart, I wouldn't need the business records of the push cart across the street to run my business.
((Ha, ha if business doesn't pick up soon, I might be able to prove my push cart theory))
But the original poster wanted to get competitors traffic stats and a count of their unique visitors and on the Internet that is pretty much worthless information.
I think visiting competitors sites can yield good intelligence.
Most webmasters I come into contact with are collecting the wrong stats. Certain stats are needed to forecast capacity requirements and generally the webmasters are getting these.
When it comes to collecting the stats that are needed to support the marketing and sales side of their company, most are total failures.
The webmasters usually don't understand what stats are needed and are often hostile to collecting them.
Just read this board to see an example of how hostile many of them are to collecting visitor statistics, or email marketing stats.
A business needs to know the cost of its product, the cost of selling that product (advertising and marketing cost) and the return on the investment in that product.
If the webmaster isn't collecting these stats how can a company succeed?
My clients are always asking for competitor analysis, so I have devised a method that seems to work reasonably well.I have used a useful little freeweare program called Goodkeywords for sometime. It doesnt show you exact visits to sites but it uses alexa data to show what it calls 'Site Popularity'. By viewing how your site ranks in comparisson to your competitors a basic but meaningful competive analysis can be acheived. I also 'Guestimate' a competing sites traffic by using the alex toolbar. if anyone has other ways I would love to hear them.
Essentially: try to find the web stats pages of competitors by doing a search on something like:
'Web Server Statistics' + keyword
Research how different stats services title their pages.
I have tried this with a bit of success
I was trying to find popular kew phrases that I hadn't targeted. A lot of stats pages have 'no index' tags or are in a secure folder - but a lot are not!
I would be interested if anyone has had more success with this.
