Forum Moderators: phranque
“[Competitor].com continues to be the MOST visited [blue widget] site on the Internet!”
“[Competitor].com pages are viewed over XXX,000 times each month. No other [blue widget] site comes close to that figure.”
Both statements are false and have been false for about six-months now. In fact, the second statement is false by a factor of about ten.
Our site is making good money and we don’t really care how much traffic [competitor].com gets. However, since we are talking about portals where clients pay for exposure, this is an important issue when dealing with potential clients. More than once we’ve been told by customers that they are going with [competitor] because they get more traffic or are a bigger site.
Have any of you been in a similar situation in the past? What did you do about it?
1.. You can ignore it.
2.. You can post a rebuttal, calling into question “ANY” ones claims as far as traffic is concerned.
My situation is quality. Copies of products are hammering us. Our patents are expiring, and we are seeing blatant copies of our products on the market. You know it’s bad when people send it back to us to repair and we have to explain to them, they bought a knockoff.
However when you rebut their claims, you acknowledge them and give them some of the market power that they are looking to get from you.
On the bright side, any communication by a customer concerning their claims shows that it is not working as expected and gives you a chance to sell yourself.
jb
How about getting a third party opinion with some weight to it, and posting the results. Alexa comes to mind.
We already post both Alexa and MetricsMarket.com traffic rankings.
One of my favorite competitors does a similar thing: Whenever i update my niche search engine's data base and show its new size at my index page, he changes his own index number to mine +10% without actually adding any new pages. This game continues since ~2 years. It's just childish. People that compare his search engine with mine pretty quick see that he is just a liar.
Why should i bother?
>How to make a competitor tell the truth.
You can't. Tell the truth yourself and you'll win the game.
More than once we’ve been told by customers that they are going with [competitor] because they get more traffic or are a bigger site.
Hmm... if you do have more and better quality traffic, how about just moving to a performance model? (Can a customer retain both your services?)
I'd also ask a lawyer... this is false advertising, and in some countries at least, it is illegal.
Anyway, a lot of companies can be the "biggest" at the same time, depending on what specific metric is used and who is doing the measuring. It all comes down to sampling methodologies, and nobody can truly know what sites gets the most traffic. I can't comment on MetricsMarket, but Alexa rankings can sometimes be very far from reality.
I would just make your own clear and specific claim, and back it up with whatever documentation you have. Your credibility is a more valuable asset than bragging rights are.
If you're selling advertising/exposure, why not put together a "Case Studies" section rather than try to rebut the claim directly? Ask some of your customers to put together a short testimonial, and have them include some relevant figures--number of visitors, conversion rate, ROI. Then, as part of the introduction, you can explain why these figures are more important than simply "number of clicks" or "number of visitors to our site".
... of course, I suppose your competitor could easily lie about those figures, too.
I normally just ignore this guy. He's one of the most dishonest and sleezy guys I've ever met. But this one bugged me because he was (albeit indirectly) making a claim about my site and my sites statistics.
I called him on the phone and asked him how he knew he had beat us. He said "because you didn't claim it first." I just chuckled and told him that we were the first to the mark and we made it months ago. He was silent.
I mentioned that we were considering a press release that we were the first to reach the bench mark and that we were on our way to doubling it by the end of the year. He backpedaled and agreed to revamp their press release and graphics etc. It was kind of funny.
Those people just crack me up. I say, just ignore em if you can. It's a karmic universe and dishonesty will come back to bite them. It always does. If they get out of hand, call them and talk to them on the phone.
I find my competitors often help me out by letting potential customers see that the internet is more cost effective than offline methods. In other words they create a market (often using expensive direct sales), and I get a piece of it.
However, he uses a particular third party free/option to pay stats program which has a pretty easy big security flaw (if you consider being able to cirumvent logins to view website statistics a security flaw).
All I had to do was open a free counter account with the same company, log in, and the substitute my account number with his account number in the URL (which I got by viewing his source code).
Well, my site gets 4K uniques per day. His site is getting under 100.
Yet, his ad rates are the same as mine. So when my clients ask if he is a good deal (he emails my advertisers regularly, to ask them to advertise with him), I just give them the URL to his stats, and say here's his visitor stats, decide for yourself.
hehehe. :)
Unfortunately, that's a pretty rare but lucky case.
