We welcome back Jay Meattle, a Compete.com original member, from HEPGURU for this guest post.

Below is a Digg and Facebook’s monthly Unique Visitor chart going all the way back to the month they were launched. After looking at the first chart, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Facebook has been growing faster than Digg (isn’t quite so), so before you do, make sure you take a look at all the charts in this post.

The chart below overlays the same Facebook vs. Digg’s traffic data to their respective launch month’s:

• In their first 4 years of existence, Digg and Facebook have very similar curves
• Digg traffic has been greater than Facebook’s 33 out of 51 months (65%)
• Facebook’s recent growth and expansion strategies are paying off in a big big way. It is going to take a special effort from Digg to continue keep pace with and beating Facebook, a leap of imagination if you will. Facebook doubled traffic in its 5th year of existence, going from 28,487,293 to 73,787,766 unique visitors. Can Digg do the same in its fifth year?

Will Kevin Rose & team at Digg be able to innovate at the pace that is required? Innovation certainly beats size when in the battle to grow attention. Digg has a lot going for them, but only time will tell how ultimately successful and innovative they will be. I’ll certainly be watching intently.

Every single year that I have prepared my own tax return (yes, I still do my own taxes), I’ve prepared them the weekend before they have been due. Examining traffic to IRS.gov for the past few years, it looks like my tax filing behavior may not be the norm!! –

My observations:

• Traffic to IRS.gov peaks in February each year (and not in April :)
• After several, mostly flat years, more people are visiting IRS.gov this year. However, my guess is that some of this increase was likely driven by people curious about the Economic Stimulus Payments. Compared to February ‘07, traffic is up 27% this year. According to Compete data, the 24.4 million unique visitors in Feb ‘08 was also the biggest month ever for IRS.gov (data goes back to 2001).

• 15.4 million Facebook users interacted with fb Application pages (@ apps.facebook.com) in January:

  

• On average ~51% of Facebook’s user base engages with Application pages:

  

• In January, fb Application pages directly contributed 1.5 billion pages (8.4% of total) to Facebook.com’s total page view count. Given the trend, I expect Application pages to gradually form a larger chunk of Facebook.com’s overall page views over time.

  Note: Stats in this post are limited to activity on apps.facebook.com. Most Facebook Applications load pages in iframes from 3rd party (non-facebook) servers. According to sources, users can generate well over >10 page views on 3rd party servers for each one that they see on apps.facebook.com. In January, Compete estimates ~1.5 billion page loads of apps.facebook.com, which translates to roughly 11-12 billion page views across Facebook app iframes.

  

• 6-month gains in time spent, sessions, and page views generated on apps.facebook.com:

  

Bottom-line:
This data reinforces the fact that Facebook’s Application strategy and ongoing refinements appear to be working. Now the big question — as Facebook’s unique visitor growth plateaus, what will be their next traffic growth engine? They are still 36 million short of MySpace.com’s 67 million U.S. unique visitors.

Does privacy matter to most Facebook users? Take a look at the chart below, and judge for yourself (weekly unique visitors to facebook’s privacy settings pages):

Even after all the recent mainstream media coverage and debate surrounding Facebook’s controversial beacon program, online privacy in general, and Facebook making available universal beacon opt-out — traffic to Facebook’s privacy settings pages has essentially been flat. NOT A GOOD SIGN!

It’s likely that the average Facebook user DOES care about their privacy, and know they should do something about it, but are mostly unaware or don’t know what they can or should do. Should Facebook be doing more around online privacy education? There is a lot of unintended sharing going on, and I think it is in Facebook’s long term best interest to do so.

A few weeks ago Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz posted an interview in which Jeremy talks about Compete’s technology, the results, what’s coming up, etc. Read on!

Compete.com Metrics - An Interview with Jeremy Crane
by Rand Fishkin

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been chatting over email with the folks at Compete.com about their web popularity reporting & analytics tools. Luckily enough, Jeremy Crane, the Director of Search & Online Media for Compete, agreed to an interview. Below, you can learn a lot more about how Compete gathers data, where they struggle, where they succeed and what the future of third party visitor analysis may hold.

Read the entire article

We released a number of Compete.com updates today!

1. Cleaner Results with Report Overviews

Now when you run a Search Analytics report, you will see a new “Report Overview” table above each report. We have big plans for this section. Look out for more here in the near future. Let us know what you think:

2. New Homepage

Search Analytics has a new homepage! Check it out @ http://searchanalytics.compete.com (you need to be signed out of MyCompete to view this page)

3. Revamped Credit History Section

The new Credit History page gives you quick access to premium reports you run on Compete.com. You can now run and update (for credits) old reports from the Credit History section of MyCompete.

Tip: Compete Search Analytics reports are updated daily. Click “Update” on the Credit History page to re-run and update old reports with the latest data.

Check out the page @ https://my.compete.com/credit/credithistory

4. More Search Analytics data on Site Analytics

You asked for it, you got it. (hint: ask for more! :) We’re now exposing more Search Analytics data on Site Analytics. The layout of the new Search Analytics module on Site Analytics is much cleaner, and also includes a new metric — the total number of keywords that are driving traffic to the domain.

In the screenshot below, you see immediately that the gurus at Amazon are doing a much better job of milking the long tail than Walmart. Over a 10x difference - 286,306 keywords drive traffic to Amazon.com vs. just 27,206 keywords to Walmart.com!

How are you doing vs. your competitors?

In addition to the above updates, we also released a number of small usability and under the hood improvements. Please keep the feedback coming. We’re listening, and reacting.