Today is an exciting day for Compete and our customers! We’ve been working on enhancements to Compete PRO Enterprise, for the past several months and today we’re releasing the result of our efforts: Compete Category Profiles provide a web wide view of traffic, search, and engagement metrics across over 220 industries and 45 Behavioral Segments to our Enterprise customers.

“But wait a minute,” we hear you saying, “How can this new Compete PRO Enterprise feature help me?” We’re glad you asked!

How Compete PRO Enterprise can help you:

Track Market Share: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to track market share and understand daily changes across your competitive landscape. For instance, the graph below shows how market share of visitors has changed over a one-year period for five leading car rental companies in the Car Rental category.

Benchmark Performance: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to benchmark your own traffic and engagement performance against the industry and identify fast-moving longer tail sites within the group. The graph below shows how trends in page views of four different cooking websites compare to all page views captured by the Cooking category.

Take Action: Use Compete’s Category Profiles and Behavioral Segments to understand and design specific media plans and campaigns to reach unique consumer groups. For instance, you can see all the search keywords that are driving traffic to sites in a specific category (Cooking Industry keywords shown below) or behavioral segment and make sure you have incorporated them into your SEM campaigns.

While full Categories access is only available to Enterprise customers, all of our PRO customers can still experience the power of Categories through the Compete 250, an index of the top 250 trafficked sites across the web. Check out the latest data from the month of June to see which sites moved quickly, which sites were the most engaging, and where consumers spent the most time online.

To learn more about Categories, Behavioral Segments, and the full Compete PRO Enterprise suite of tools, click here.

And once you’ve looked over the new capabilities, let us know what you’d like to see next. 2009 is only half over and our business is built on meeting your needs!

May’s data is here and it’s hot! It was a big month and the data shows some tell-tale signs that Twitter’s days of monster growth are waning, Microsoft’s $100 million marketing budget for Bing may be paying off, and the sour economy is not negatively impacting summer vacation plans.

Twitter Site Visitors Put on the Brakes

It had to happen eventually, and May was the month that traffic to Twitter.com started to show signs of fatigue (up 1% to 19.7 Million Unique Visitors). While this is not the whole story behind the emerging Social site because users often interact with Twitter without visiting the actual site, it is a sign that new user growth in the U.S. may be flattening. Stay tuned for more on this one going forward.

Big May for Microsoft

The Softies had a busy month up in Redmond, spending big budgets to launch Bing as well as a new version of their Zune player. Early indicators point to some solid buzz around both products, with traffic to zune.net increasing 13% to 708,000 UVs, and Bing driving 635,000 people through the door.

Home and Garden

April showers have clearly given way to May flowers, at least in some parts of the country – sites spanning the Home and Garden category got a nice bump in May, as consumers took to their yards, tended to gardens, and fully embraced the warmer weather. Notable movers included Home Depot’s homeimproverclub.com (up 132% to 500,000 UVs), managemyhome.com (up 52% to 458,000 UVs), backyardgardener.com (up 26% to 531,000 UVs), and hgtv.com (up 24% to 5.5 Million UVs).

Domestic Travel Heats Up

Budgets may be tighter this year, but all signs point to consumers still making vacation plans for the summer. Visitor traffic increased to the National Parks and Services site, nps.gov (up 14% to 3.2 Million UVs), and local theme park sites, like hersheypark.com (up 47% to 416,000 UVs). As a result, major hotel sites like holidayinn.com (up 18% to 979,000 UVs), bestwestern.com (up 11% to 1.9 Million UVs), and daysinn.com (up 14% to 1 Million UVs) all saw a lift alongside rental car sites, which were also positively impacted – budget.com (up 25% to 1.7 Million UVs), hertz.com (up 1.7 Million UVs), and avis.com (up 10% to 1.4 Million UVs).

See you at the Show: Movie Ticket Sites

Some blockbuster films hit the box office in May, including Star Trek, Terminator, and Up. As a result, traffic to movie ticket sites like fandango.com (up 29% to 8 Million UVs), moviefone.com (up 23% to 5.2 Million UVs), and movietickets.com (up 28% to 3.7 Million UVs) increased considerably.

Check out the May monthly data on Site Analytics, Referral Analytics and Ranked Lists.

Highlights from May include Twitter’s recently surging traffic flattening out.

And as a reminder, Search Analytics data is updated daily!

Michael Rucker of YouTube recently joined us at the TNS Media Digital CMO Summit and shared some of his views on online video in the Digital 180 interview series. Michael discuss how the differences between broadcast and online video change how marketers should approach each and other trends he sees in online video. Check back next week for more insights from the Digital 180 series.

Enfatico CEO Torrence Boone recently took some time out to share his insights in the latest Digital 180 interview. Torrence talks about the importance of delivering creativity and ideas cost-effectively as well as the relationship between creative and analytic/scientific thinking in marketing. Check back with the Compete Blog for more insights from the TNS Media Digital Summit and the Digital 180.

In the latest installment of Compete’s Digital 180 series Morgans Hotel Group’s CMO, Scott Williams, shares his views about how to remain daring and innovative as a brand during this downturn of the economy. Stay tuned to the Compete Blog for more insights from the TNS Media Digital Summit and the Digital 180.