It’s time to get a little bit tactical. On the Compete blog, we talk about data all the time, but very rarely do we actually “show” and not just “tell.” I get pretty fired up about Compete PRO, and the latest enhancements to Search Analytics provide a great excuse to devote an entire post to my favorite Compete PRO report: Keyword Destination.

Call it shameless self-promotion, but as far as I’m concerned, no online marketer can live without Keyword Destination, which sheds light on where people go downstream after searching for specific keywords.

Continue reading “Getting The Most Out Of Compete PRO : Keyword Destination Reports” »

2009 is BIG for Back to School: Staples and Office Depot See YOY Growth in Q3

September marked the beginning of the school year and the end of the Back to School Season for office supply retailers. Q3 sales figures have yet to be released, but if site volume is any indicator, online office supply retailers saw a year over year boom. Industry leaders, staples.com and officedepot.com, each saw huge gains – staples.com up 59% YOY to 23.7MM unique visitors (UVs) and officedepot.com up 21% YOY to 13.3MM UVs in Q3.

Traffic from the search engines contributed greatly to these gains – staples.com up 45% YOY and officedepot.com up 22% YOY in total search referrals.

Continue reading “Sept Data is Live: 2009 is BIG for Back to School” »

I have a sweet tooth, and everyone knows it. Whether it’s a 2 liter bottle of grape soda, a bag full of gummy worms, or a giant cherry Danish, nothing gets me rocking and rolling like a burst of sugar during my day. I consider myself a pretty lucky guy – each day for the past week and a half leading up to this launch, Gregg Poulin, my boss and GM at compete.com, has made it part of his daily routine to pick me up a donut on his way to the office, giving me a sweet little surprise waiting at my desk every morning.

All that sugar truly made me happy. It also got me thinking: What if I could give every Compete customer a regular dose of sweetness each time they logged into their PRO account? Well, with today’s new launch, I think we’ve done just that.

Continue reading “Sweetness! Compete PRO just got that much better!” »

August data is live and there was plenty of movement with the summer winding down, back to school, back to business, and the kickoff of football season.

Football Season

For marketers, the college and NFL action during football season translates to major ad spend, and as the action heats up, fans jump online to stay in tune. Football sites saw a sharp uptick in seasonal traffic in August, with Unique Visitors (UVs) to the Compete Football category up 92.2% over July, 2009. While NFL.com led the pack with nearly 6.5 Million Unique Visitors in August, fantasy fanatics flocked to cbssports.com (up 41% to 4.35 Million Unique Visitors), fantasysports.yahoo.com (up 79% to 4.75 Million UVs), and fftoolbox.com (up 350% to 579,000 UVs) to start their own seasons.

Fast Movers

Business, mass merchants, and government interest all climbed the ranks in August.

With an overwhelming amount of online data available, pinpointing relevant data to support marketing initiatives is a challenging task. Even the most experienced online publishers can easily be inundated with all of the tools, applications, and articles that flood the internet. Here at Compete, we pool all of the relevant information you’ll need to fuel competitive marketing decisions (like you didn’t know that). More specifically, in this blog post I will show you how to pull Site Profile & Comparison reports while using this information to guide SEO and SEM decisions. This is the first blog of a larger series that will lay the foundation for your competitive marketing initiatives.

First off, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Kyle Waring, and I am an entertainment publisher for a network of 170 websites. Our main property, Bored.com, provides entertaining content to cure boredom and acts as a portal to our other websites. As a publisher, identifying revenue as a derivative of traffic is the first step in understanding the larger picture. By using Compete.com’s Site Comparison Report tool you can see how you stack up against your competitors using various metrics.

I took our main competitors (I-Am-Bored.com, Kontraband.com, and Killsometime.com) and ran a report analyzing the metric: Unique Visitors. This allows me to quickly gauge how Bored.com is performing relative to our Competitors.

How is this information useful to us as publishers?

When a competitor’s website is performing well, this should spark a rage of fury. Compete.com’s Site Profile tool allows you to quickly see the composition of your competitor’s traffic, and provides insight into how your competition is executing their marketing tactics.

If we use I-am-bored.com as an example, let’s pull up a Site Profile report by clicking on the I-am-bored link below the graph on the Comparison page. I have selected I-am-bored.com because it is the closest competitor in terms of unique visitors.

From this page we are able to see a snapshot of several key metrics. Unique Visitors, Visits, Page Views and others, which illustrate I-am-bored’s user base. If you are a PRO subscriber, you can pull a comparison report for each of the metrics. This allows you to see how a competitor has performed in the past, relative to your website (by: Unique Visitors, Visits, Page Views, etc).

When I compare Bored.com to I-am-bored.com based on Pages / Visit, we are able to understand the differences in visitor engagement across both sites. This poses questions like, “Why are their visitors viewing more pages than ours, and why is it picking up at a rapid rate?” Thinking on a higher level and going beyond the tools, we should look into a few distinguishing factors - What kind of layout they are using? (Is it a 2 column layout, or 3 column, etc.?) What content is generating the most views? Did they add anything new to the site to enhance engagement?

Understanding visitor engagement for each of your competitors provides valuable data that can guide strategic decisions. For example, looking further into I-am-bored.com’s high engagement, I decided to setup an account on their site and browse the site for content. It didn’t seem like they added a new section, or built new content for their users. After spending some time on the site, I did notice that once you sign up, you’re automatically subscribed to their weekly newsletter. Although this is just one minute detail that I noticed, it could certainly affect pages / visit dramatically.

In further efforts to tackle the engagement gap seen on the Site Analytics reports, we are setting up a weekly newsletter to encourage visitors to frequently return to the site. This release is scheduled for September, and will help our website remain competitive in the constantly changing marketplace.

This is just one way I use Compete.com to guide my marketing decisions. There are many other ways to use the same data discussed in this blog. From my perspective, one of the most powerful aspects of this tool is that it points me in a direction where I can easily find subtleties in my competitors’ sites that would have otherwise taken me hours to uncover. Next week when we uncover Search Analytics and Referral Analytics, I will show you how powerful actionable competitive data can be, and how much time Compete.com can save you. Please leave me a comment if you have questions or feedback.

The past week has been a big one for Compete! In addition to June data going live, we launched some exciting enhancements to Compete PRO Enterprise, our most powerful Compete PRO offering. Enterprise subscribers now have access to 220 industry category profiles and 45 behavioral segments to make it easier to discover, take action, and measure online marketing performance.

Top 250 Website List Now Available!

All Compete PRO customers now have a chance to experience Compete Categories for yourself with the Compete 250, a rolling index of the top 250 sites on the web, updated monthly.

June is Big for Bing

Traffic to Bing.com continues to skyrocket. The site garnered 50 million unique visitors (UVs) in June, its first full month live. As a result, more and more people are gaining interest and taking the time to learn more about what Bing has to offer - Microsoft’s Bing info site, discoverbing.com, and club site, clubbing.com, received 1.3 million UVs and 759,000 UVs respectively.

Circuit City is Back

Systemax, behemoth multi-channel computer and consumer electronics retailer and owner of popular online properties like Tigerdirect.com and CompUSA.com, purchased Circuit City’s remaining assets after it declared bankruptcy in November of last year. On May 23, Systemax brought CircuitCity.com back to life and June’s data shows that the site is off to a good start. While the 1.4 million UVs may only be around 13% of the traffic the site experienced when it had national brick and mortar presence (close to 8 million people per month), it represents almost 50% of TigerDirect.com’s traffic (3.3 million UVs) and 40% more than CompUSA.com received in June (997,000 UVs).

With 12.4 million total combined visits in June to their three big Electronics properties, Systemax managed to attract 5% of all visits to the Electronics Shopping Sites category, more traffic than newegg.com and up in the ranks with bestbuy.com (3rd), apple.com (2nd), and dell.com (1st). The graph below from Compete’s new Categories interface shows Systemax’s market share of visitors within the Electronics Shopping Sites category for the three online properties over the last year.

MLB Attracts More Online Fans in May, despite NBA and NHL Playoffs

On June 30, 2009, Compete released the rankings of the top 10 sports fan sites in May 2009. Even with the NBA and NHL playoffs underway in May, Major League Baseball fans outnumbered NBA fans online more than two to one and NHL fans more than four to one. MLB.com reached more than 12,227,000 sports enthusiasts in May 2009 (up 35% since May 2008), followed by NBA.com with 5,624,776 unique visitors (UVs), Nascar.com with 3,716,636 UVs and NHL.com with 2,899,406 UVs.

Sports fan interest among the big leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL and NFL) is also up year over year with significant increases for MLB.com (35 percent) and NBA.com (32 percent). Meanwhile, wwe.com and nascar.com visits dropped while pgatour.com and minorleaguebaseball.com cracked the top ten in May 2009.