Where were you on Black Friday? If you were online, there is a pretty decent chance that you were looking for a sweet deal or two, and where better to find a deal than walmart.com? Well, you weren’t alone. Nearly 7% of all U.S. Internet users on Black Friday visited walmart.com, almost seven times the site’s average reach on any given day in 2008. But what was behind this remarkable spike? Using Compete Pro Analytics, we took a closer look at Walmart’s strategy to identify a few ways in which walmart.com blew away the competition.

Step 1: Using Compete Site Analytics, we ran a Daily Reach report for walmart.com. The graph below highlights our findings: walmart.com’s Black Friday Reach equaled that of amazon.com’s – nearly7% of all people online that day!

Step 2: Next, using Compete Referral Analyics, we drilled down to examine some of the sources of Walmart’s online traffic. One clear alliance that walmart.com forged was with key Black Friday specific sites. As you can see in the data below, walmart.com captured nearly twice the referral traffic share from the top ten Black Friday websites as the next closest competitor.

Step 3: Using Compete Ranked Lists, we ran a report on the top 15,000 Compete ranked sites in November, sorted that list by growth and examined the top ten Black Friday sites. On average, traffic to these sites grew by 1600% over the previous month, confirming that Walmart’s strategy of leveraging Black Friday site traffic lift was a good one.

Step 4: Finally, we honed in on Search data with Compete Search Analytics to see if Walmart’s multichannel media blitz was coupled with Search marketing. Using the Keyword Destination report, we ran a Broad Match for the term “Black Friday”, and sure enough, walmart.com was the top retailer site getting traffic from the keyword.

A carefully crafted and well-executed traffic acquisition strategy resulted in walmart.com kicking off the holiday shopping season with a bang.

September data is now live on Compete.com! See what’s changed for the sites you care about with Compete’s Site Analytics, Ranked Lists and Referral Analytics tools.

One of the more interesting ways to use Compete data is to highlight the shifting web-wide trends in online consumer interest, and September proved to be no exception. With major hurricanes at the beginning of the month, the economic turmoil at the month’s end, and the NFL season in gear all month long, many of the fastest-growing sites had to do with weather, government, or the NFL:

• First Gustav, then Hanna, and then Ike had weather, local and gov. sites buzzing: Interest in the hurricanes pushed three sites onto the top movers list - stormpulse.com, khou.com, and fema.gov.
• Bye Bye Weekend Warriors: With football back in full swing, NFL.com has now become the weekend hangout – illustrated nicely by a spike in reach on the weekends to NFL.com.
• Bailout buzz ended the month in a flurry: House.gov, Senate.gov, and fdic.gov got the nations attention when debating the bailout for the country’s ills.
• Are you still watching football? NFL.com ruled vs. the debate at House.gov and Senate.gov when looking at reach for those sites during the critical -bailout weekend.
• If all that wasn’t spooky enough: Halloween costume sites grew at a faster seasonal pace than expected. Check out halloweenexpress.com (219%+) and buycostumes.com (180%+) for the latest and greatest data on trends to those sites.

This analysis was all done using Compete Product - Ranked lists! For the entire list of sites you’re interested in (up to 500,000) Compete Ranked lists can show the month-over-month change for any metric you choose. Take advantage of Compete Pro and conduct your own analysis. Then dive in deeper to find out if these movers saw consistent growth, or an event driven spike with Daily Reach or find which sites are getting the most for their money through our newest Compete Pro procuct - Referral Analytics

Use the promotional code "ADVPRO" during the purchase process and save $100 off the first month of your Pro Advanced subscription!

Imagine a world where you could see where your competitors were getting traffic, and also know where 97% of your potential customers were going after visiting your site! Before now, it was almost impossible to find great data on your rivals’ customer acquisition tactics - equally frustrating was trying to understand where people were going when they left your site.

Well, fly blind no more! The Compete PRO Team has just launched Referral Analytics with referral and destination reports on Compete PRO. With data on over One Million Websites, these two reports give you swiss-army precise information about your online marketing and site design effectiveness. And the best part of it is that you can now get this information for yourself and your key competitors on a monthly basis. See the screenshot below for a visual example:

• Referral reports reveal that TinyURL.com receives 18.3% of it’s traffic from Twitter, a growth of nearly 20% from last month;
• Destination reports show that circuitcity.com receives 4.80% of the visitors leaving bestbuy.com and that bestbuy.com receives only 2.05% of the visitors leaving circuitcity.com!

The deal!

Compete PRO’s Referral Analytics Reports are available to Compete Pro Advanced or Enterprise customers. You can now save $2,000 (33%) off the Advanced Annual PRO subscription plan by upgrading today. On top of that for the remainder of September you can run unlimited Referral Reports!

• Sign up for a Compete Pro Advanced Annual Plan
• Enter promotional code " BLOG08 " during the checkout process
• Start running reports today!

We have been listening to your feedback, working hard to launch the next generation of Compete.com. So today, we are very proud to announce the launch of Compete PRO!

Compete’s mission in life is to help marketers measure and increase the effectiveness of their marketing programs. Our analyst teams have been doing this for years with big brands in the Automotive, Telecom, Financial Services, Travel and Media markets. Within the past year, Compete.com has become a go-to-resource for more than one million marketers every month. And now, Compete PRO extends this vision, bringing new products and deeper looks into our data.

What is Compete PRO and why did we create it?

Compete PRO is the most comprehensive online measurement platform available in the industry – combining site analytics, search analytics and audience measurement in a single service. We created Compete PRO as a resource for savvy marketers looking for deeper information across a larger universe of sites, segments, search terms and campaigns.

When we launched Compete.com two years ago, we opened up access to audience measurement and web analytics data that had only been available to large companies who could afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year in annual subscription fees. Compete.com changed that.

With today’s launch of Compete PRO, we are adding new metrics, new reports and new payment plans that continue our philosophy of premium-grade online metrics at a lower price than our competitors. Lower prices mean that more companies will have access to this data, which in turn means more innovation and growth in the online marketing space. That’s good for everybody!

What new reports will Compete PRO members have access to?

Compete PRO members will receive the largest amount of information available on Compete.com, including:

• Search Analytics: New search term, site and market category report packages that enable 50, 150 and 250 reports to be run every month
• Site Analytics: New metrics, daily updates and a full twenty-five months of history reporting on Reach, Page Views and Visitor Engagement
• Ranked Lists: Fully tap into Compete’s data by downloading ranked lists of up to 500,000 sites, ranked by any metric available on Compete.com

Our product roadmap includes the addition of many new metrics, a continuously streamlined interface that matches how you use Compete.com and new tools that encourage more functions within companies to tap into the rich consumer data. Some of the new information members can expect to receive will include metrics from our TNS sister companies including social media metrics from Cymfony, as well as monthly ad spending and occurrence data from our Media Intelligence colleagues.

What does it cost?

Compete PRO is offered through three packages that give you access to more reports and deeper looks into the data. We will also offer enterprise-level packages for customers that need full access to Compete’s industry leading data and insights. Of course we will still offer free membership through MyCompete!

Compete PRO puts more insights and data into EVERY marketers’ hands. Whether you are a brand marketer, product marketer, or search marketer you will find that Compete PRO will pay back your investment in the matter of days. We love what it offers, but more importantly we hope you do too!

Last week, Wall Street and Madison Avenue were abuzz with the news that Google Paid Search Ad clickthroughs had gone flat in terms of volume. But just as traders dumped the stock and caused its share price to plummet, others were questioning that decision. But one factor that everyone seemed to ignore was the little fact that this year contains a full extra day worth of potential business. This got us thinking - what does that extra day really mean in terms of online marketing?

Looking at our data we know that in January in the U.S. there were 600 billion page views which would be a daily average of 20 million page views. In the 4th quarter of 2007 internet ad spending totaled $7.3 billion or about $81 million per day according to the IDC in a recent ClickZ article.

Combining this with published ad revenue numbers, it would appear that US pageviews collectively have a CPM to marketers of about $4.18.

So marketers will be spending $81 million today that they would not have in the previous three years. In the spirit of GoldenPlace.com’s bizarre marketing efforts (hey, they apparently work…here we are creating buzz), we came up with some ways marketers could spend this money when the year is one day shorter, to put this all in perspective.

What Else Could Leap Day Ad Revenue Buy?
	Give 400,000 kids an OLPC with your logo on it
	Buy 17% of all goods for sale on eBay for that day
	Give 550,000 JitterBug phones to seniors in need with your logo on them
	Fund Barack Obama’s campaign for another two months
	Take over Digg’s advertising for 2 years 6 months
	Buy A New Ferrari 599 in every color available in the 8 bit spectrum (256)
	Buy up ALL of Google’s Adword’s inventory for the next 7 days.
	Rent Necker Island from Richard Branson for 5 years and send you favorite customers there ($300,000 per week)
	Buy 40 million Compete.com credits and eat your competitor’s lunch
	Pay 1 hour 40 minutes of the interest on the National Debt.

The Treasury has made it easy for individuals to reduce the debt. You just have to give a “Gift to reduce Debt Held by the Public“…

…it’s just too bad they don’t take paypal.