Over the next two years, I could save $721 in cell phone bills if I switched to a 1000 anytime minute individual T-Mobile plan plus 300 text messages and unlimited web.

That’s according to BillShrink.com, a site that tells you which wireless carrier could save you money when you enter information about your cell phone usage, what you are paying, and where you use the phone. The site offers a similar service for saving money on credit card bills, as well as helping users find the cheapest gas. To give you a better sense of what the BillShrink.com results look like, I’ve included a screenshot of my top result.

BillShrink.com has recently been given a lot of publicity due to its relationship with the wireless carrier T-Mobile, as T-Mobile consistently - though not always- comes up as the best value for a wireless shopper. Billshrink.com is prominently featured in T-Mobile’s new online and TV ad campaign (alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones) that encourages anyone and everyone to use Billshrink.com to see which service and plan will save them the most money while providing them with ample coverage.

So how has this relationship affected T-Mobile and BillShrink.com? Is it a mutually beneficial relationship, or is one side reaping more benefits? We can start by looking at traffic to BillShrink.com over the past year.

• From this chart we can see that T-Mobile appears to have had a large impact on traffic to BillShrink.com. Though T-Mobile started including links on its site for BillShrink.com in March, it’s clear the largest impact occurred when it began its broader campaign in May.
• In addition to an increase in traffic, we can further tell this relationship with T-Mobile has impacted Billshrink.com as 43% of visitors to Billshrink.com used the Wireless Plan area of the site in May, compared to only 22% using the wireless area in March.

Looking at data on Compete.com, we found that the T-Mobile campaign seems to be giving Billshrink.com a significant boost: the carrier accounted for 12.8% of all referrals to BillShrink.com, and was the destination site for 7.4% of all visitors to BillShrink.com.

All this data certainly tells me that the T-Mobile relationship has benefited BillShrink.com. T-Mobile, however, is the one that went out on a limb by telling consumers to check this site and see which carrier will save them the most money. So has this campaign benefited T-Mobile too? To get a sense of the impact, we looked at how many T-Mobile shoppers are also visiting BIllShrink.com.

This chart is looking at the volume of T-Mobile.com visitors also visiting BillShrink.com, represented by the blue bars and mapped to the right axis. The diamonds represent the % of overall T-Mobile.com traffic that also used BillShrink.com in the given month, and is mapped to the right axis. So what does this chart show us?

• Since the relationship began, there has been an increase in T-Mobile.com visitors also using BillShrink.com, shown by the blue bars. Unfortunately for T-Mobile, even with a 211% M-O-M increase in the volume of visitors visiting both sites in May, this still represents less than 2% of overall traffic, shown by the diamonds.
• Breaking this down a little further, we found that 49% of the T-Mobile.com visitors also using BillShrink.com in May were T-Mobile Customers, which is likely not the target group T-Mobile is hoping will use BillShrink.com.

To further investigate the impact on T-Mobile, I also took a look at how many of the T-Mobile.com visitors also using BillShrink.com went on to purchase within the same month (either a phone and plan or an upgrade) on T-Mobile.com. The results were negligible, indicating sending T-Mobile shoppers to BillShrink.com has not yet had an impact on shoppers purchasing on T-Mobile.com.

So it seems as though this relationship is mainly benefiting only one side, but there is an important additional factor we should not ignore. I’ve been in three T-Mobile retail stores lately, and all of them have computers set up for shoppers to use BillShrink.com (though we should note we cannot track activity on BillShrink.com from T-Mobile stores). I imagine this is a very powerful tool for T-Mobile Sales reps, as it is hard for a shopper to argue that they need to continue to shop when BillShrink.com is showing them T-Mobile will save them the most money. I have a hunch that BillShrink.com is actually having a larger impact on offline sales than we’ve seen online so far.

This campaign only truly began in May, so in the coming months we will be watching to see if it starts to have a bigger impact on T-Mobile.com sales. Still, T-Mobile’s use of Billshrink.com in its campaign was creative, and in the long run will likely benefit the carrier as T-Mobile continues to promote it heavily and more shoppers continue to use BillShrink.com. T-Mobile has found a way to promote its value and its growing coverage area while using an independent company to validate its claims.

So, now that I know I could save $700 over the next two years by switching to T-Mobile, am I going to? To be honest, I replaced my 1st generation iPhone with the 3rd generation iPhone last Friday. For me, more went into my wireless phone and plan purchase decision than just the cost.

BillShrink.com may not have convinced me to switch, but I have no doubt that for many wireless shoppers finding the best value is the most important thing in their wireless phone and plan decision, and BillShrink.com will likely help them in that decision.

When an extra minute or two checking around for a coupon code could save you money on an online purchase, it certainly seems worth the time. I can’t remember the last time I bought something online without checking for a coupon code first, and I’m just one of 32 million consumers in the U.S. that visited a coupon site last month (up from 28 million a year ago).

Compete’s recently released list of the top 10 Coupon and Deal sites shows a changing landscape over the past year as economic woes have weighed on consumers’ willingness to make purchases.

Among the top sites, Coupons.com is still the clear-cut leader, however the gap has closed since last year and the big mover on the list is RetailMeNot.com. RetailMeNot’s collaborative approach to coupon and deal hunting has helped it stand out in a crowded field of coupon sites and made it top-of-mind for shoppers. Consumers not only find deals on the site, but rate each deal code and share what they find, driving the best deals to the head of the list. Over 50,000 consumers share coupon codes on the site each month. In addition, the site jumped from sixth to third in our rankings over the past year, with nearly 200% growth in visitors. RetailMeNot captured 18% of all searches for the term ‘coupon code’ over the past three months, 4X higher than its closest competitor (couponcabin.com).

As the nation’s unemployment rate continues to climb, it seems the newly jobless are increasingly filing and managing their unemployment online.

Traffic to state unemployment claims filing domains has, not surprisingly, jumped drastically over the past year in areas hardest hit by the recession.  Markets affected most by the real estate implosion, such as California and Arizona (eapply4ui.edd.ca.gov & egov.azdes.gov ), as well as those facing down the automotive meltdown, such as Ohio and Michigan ( unemployment.ohio.gov & bwuc-claims.state.mi.us ), are seeing UVs to their claims gateways explode.

While traffic to those claims filing sites alone is certainly not evidence of conversion (actually filing a claim), the trends post-September 2008 are clearly apparent.  Additionally, Unique Visitor trends to sites of populous states, like California’s eapply4ui.edd.ca.gov, are clearly behaving as leading indicators of trends to job search sites like Monster.com; patterns of traffic to California’s site appear to lag Monster by about a month or two.

I stumbled upon a new site last month, rockyou.com, while I was perusing the top sites for attention every month. Just in case anyone was confused on what exactly that attention metric we talk about is; let’s use Facebook as an example. In June facebook.com accounted for 6.55% of all seconds spent for every single person online across the entire US! That means for every 2 minutes spent in cyber land, 13 of those seconds were spent online stalking old colleagues on Facebook. Well, rockyou.com is not quite as prevalent but at rank 39 it still accounted for over .1% of all time spent online in April.

So that’s what got this site on my radar which has been operational since mid 2006 and was closely involved with making widgets for Myspace and is the most prevalent widget maker (in terms of downloads) for Facebook since December 2007. (I don’t know what I would do without Wikipedia). Well since then they have teamed up with a bunch of the big time social networks and increased the site traffic year-over-year from 5 million unique visitors in April ’08 to almost 29 million in April ’09, over 5x!

I’m sure there are a ton of great widgets that you can use to pimp up your profile and continue to push Facebook attention off the charts but the hot new offering is their “Best Slideshow Ever!” app. In the name of responsible journalism and morbid curiosity, it was my duty to try out the tool. After careful examination I was pleasantly surprised with the results. As always, our readers have the final say on whether or not it can produce The Best Slideshow Ever but for my test show I think it did the trick. Let us know what you think of RockYou.com.

The summer movie blockbuster season is just about here, with major new releases set to hit theaters in the next couple weeks. Studies show that advertising support can break or make a blockbuster in the lead up to opening night.

On the web, movie advertisers love big, bold banners on popular movie sites like Yahoo! Movies, Fandango and MySpace. Here at Compete, we’ve got an eye on the MySpace homepage and saw some great looking creative in May.

In a recent post, we saw how 72% of MySpace visitors saw the homepage – the crown jewel in MySpace’s strategy to sell advertising like portals. That’s a huge volume of impressions, but how valuable are they really?

To get a better sense, we looked at same day viewthrough or the rate at which ad-exposed unique visitors visited the movie page.

Terminator Salvation clearly kicked MySpace movie ad butt! At 0.80% Viewthrough, Terminator outperformed the average by 2.7x.

Fractions of a percent may not seem like much, but keep in mind that MySpace had nearly 57 million unique visitors last month – that translates to tens of thousands of ad viewthroughs everyday.

Some fans just can’t get enough. We also took a look at those MySpace users who saw a movie ad and decided to do a little research.

Ah, the Trekkies. Of course, geekdom went crazy when Star Trek came to the silver screen last month. MySpace geeks (not an oxymoron) were no exception, with .11% of ad exposed visitors also heading warp speed over to IMDB.

As the biggest movie research site on the net, it’s not exactly, “Going boldy where no man has gone before.” But with at 3.2x the average for other movies on MySpace in May, it certainly got us thinking…

What if both winners joined up for a sequel? “Terminator Trekkers.” Now that’s one movie that MySpacers would pay to see!

Last week, Sprint and Palm released the Pre to rave reviews that praised the device for being the first true competition to the iPhone juggernaut.

Palm and Sprint drove substantial traffic to their web sites with the announcement of the Pre at CES in January, in a move similar to Apple’s unveiling of the first generation iPhone at MacWorld two years earlier. Nearly 400,000 people visited Pre-related pages on Sprint.com and/or Palm.com the week of the announcement.

After months of speculation from industry analysts and consumers, Sprint and Palm announced on May 19th that the Pre would be available for purchase on June 6th. As one might expect, visitors to the Pre pages on Sprint.com and Palm.com jumped after many weeks of flat traffic and jumped again the week the device finally became available for purchase.

This chart shows the number of people researching the Pre and the original iPhone, indexed to the device’s launch week. As you can see, the Pre may be getting a healthy amount of interest from consumers online, but it doesn’t rival the interest seen in the original iPhone launch. Likewise, Sprint and Palm’s traffic spike the week of the Pre launch didn’t match the massive jump Apple experienced upon the iPhone’s release.

• Aggregate traffic for the Pre from both Sprint and Palm’s web sites increased 84% the week of launch to over 475,000 unique visitors.
• Traffic to Apple.com’s iPhone content increased 102% the week of the iPhone launch to over 750,000 unique visitors. Note that this is just traffic to Apple.com – this number would be even higher if AT&T’s traffic was included.

Apple’s relentless hype machine and strong brand equity played significant roles in this major increase, but a significant factor may have simply been the relative sizes of the websites involved, as you can see in the following chart.

The truth is that Palm.com does not attract visitors at comparable levels to Apple.com, and, to a lesser extent, the same can be said about Sprint.com compared to Wireless.ATT.com. However, considering the relative sizes of these sites, Palm and Sprint did a solid job at driving interest in the Pre and are already reaping the benefits of this highly anticipated launch.

The next real challenge will be sustaining interest and sales of the device – one great sales week hasn’t propelled any of the previous iPhone challengers to the top of the heap.