Is it possible to track a competitor's visits?

boss wants me to use traffic estimate to keep an eye on the competition

[yellowbeetle]

Howdy -
Newbie here.
My boss came up with this website (trafficestimate) that says it estimates traffic to any website you type into their form.

I put in several websites that I have awstats access to and the numbers of visits it estimated were way higher than my own stats.

What could they be counting to get such a wacky number?
If I track their wacky numbers and associate it with my own more down-to-earth numbers, could I end up with decent data? Anyone have any experience with this site?
Is it even possible to find out how much traffic They.com gets?
Or am I best off just keeping an eye on their Alexa ranking?

Thanks for your insights,
yellowbeetle

[stapel]

I ran my own site through this "service", and got a number which is about one-fifth of my actual traffic. So, at a guess, I'd say this "service" is a waste of time.

While Alexa ratings have their problems, they're probably the best proxy you've got for relative traffic going to related sites.

I could be wrong, of course....

Eliz.

[wolfadeus]

Tricky one - I had a similar question recently. You can try to look up inbound links or track rankings and match them with overture-data on the popularity of searches, but I havn't heard of an easy way of doing it.

If you had a program that searched a website for a set of say 200 keywords, checked its rankings on the major search engines and matched it with overture search numbers, you could get pretty accurate estimates of the SE traffic (not the links). I don't know of such a tool, but if you can program it, you might make some good money with it - but remember: 10% to wolfadeus ;P

W.