With the ever growing competition among the thousands websites in the cyber market, each one trying to hug the biggest chunk of web traffic, software companies have been busy coming out with devices to measure and analyze accurately their niches in the market.
Providing accurate analyses of market movements and trends is a powerful tool in coming up with correct marketing decisions.
One of these software that analyze the behaviour of the market by which websites base their marketing plans is COMPETE. It is a web traffic service that operates in the United States. It publishes regularly the approximate number of U.S. visitors to the top 1 million web sites. This is done by computing various data sources like internet providers, propriety opt-in panels, and application service providers.
Compete monitors web traffic via user toolbars. They extrapolate the data they collect from the users who’ve installed their toolbar. It provides information on traffic history, how sites compare against the competition, trust scores, ranked lists etc.
Compete.com provides two categories of information:
• Site Analytics: a free service, where the user can enter any domain name and receive unique visitors and Compete Rank for the entered site.
• Search Analytics: a paid service that shows the user which keywords are sending traffic to the user’s website and its competitors.
One set back of COMPETE is that it only give out data on U.S. users—not international. This is so because they believe the U.S. has the largest and most diverse online consumers, and hence, could already provide fairly accurate data on internet users worldwide with some interpolations.
Compete is very biased towards the US as that’s their core monitoring market. It suffers from other significant defects. For years Compete has been ignorant of the fact that Limited companies in the UK use .ltd.uk domains as in companyname.ltd.uk. It treats the ccTLD of .ltd.uk as a domain and all these company sites as sub-domains of ltd.uk. (It doesn’t display the same ignorance for .co.uk.) So for years it’s been combining the stats for thousands of websites and reporting them as one!
Another popular software in the market that analyses web site traffic on the internet is QUANCAST, a pioneer of direct audience measurements. Quantcast is a digital advertising company specializing in audience measurement and real-time advertising. It boasts on delivering more relevant advertising which requires deeper understanding of online audiences. Quantcast understands best digital audiences across the web, allowing marketers and publishers to buy and sell the most effective targeted advertising at significant scale. More than 1,000 brands rely on Quantcast for real-time advertising.
Quantcast’s technology utilizes the industry’s most in-depth understanding of digital audiences, takes into account from the generation of initial awareness to driving the actual purchase. This special combination allows Quantcast to make the best targeted advertising decisions for performance and brand campaigns, on every individual impression.
One outstanding advantage of Quancast Measure over Compete is the global scope of its analyses.
Also, it provides for free accurate, dependable, and insightful information about audiences for over 100 million web destinations.
By utilizing the services offered by these market analyzers, website owners are provided with deep demographics, geography, and detailed lifestyle information of web browsers, an indispensable tool to assist website owners to have an accurate measure on how they fare in the cyber marketing.