This week, Compete is introducing Digital 180, an “online TV” series that hunts for new insights by going behind the scenes with some of the industry’s most innovative and influential marketers. It’s no mistake that we’re kicking off Digital 180 at the Digital CMO Summit in Newport, RI. Formerly Compete Customer Day, this event has grown from its humble roots as a gathering of select clients into a who’s who of marketing genius. This year, Digital CMO Summit 2009 featured 150 marketers representing the world’s biggest agencies, leading marketing technologist and, of course, iconic global brands.

For two days, we witnessed the future of our industry. Guided by the event’s theme, “Measuring Up,” the speakers talked about how internet and digital media are transforming their businesses, what they are doing to win online and how they are creating stronger connections between data-driven digital insights and meaningful ROI. Through presentations and panels, we not only learned how other brands “measure up,” but also we took home some never-before-revealed secrets for success.

Moving forward, we’ll continue to deliver interesting, insightful and useful programming through the Digital 180 channel. Through brief interviews, such as the one you’ll see below, and other video content, we’ll show you what leading digerati are thinking and, from time to time, provide our unique spin on news, events and our work. We hope you enjoy Digital 180, and we look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions.

Another month has come and gone, leaving behind a trail of data and some interesting stories around springtime, sports, and social media. What changes did April bring? We dug into the numbers to look at fast moving sites, traffic trends, and some of the biggest stories of 2009 that we’ve been covering.

Everybody’s asking about it, so we’ll kick it off with Twitter, an ever-growing presence in the social arena. Aided by Ashton, Oprah, and significant media buzz, Unique Visitors to twitter.com increased to 19.4 Million in April, surpassing the New York Times for the first time. Oprah’s first tweet on April 17th delivered the highest Daily Reach ever to the site, with nearly 2% of all Americans online visiting Twitter.

Feeding off Twitter: Sure, Twitter is growing, but so are the many sites that rely on it. Fast movers in April included tweetmeme.com (up 338% to 1.68 Million Unique Visitors), tweetdeck.com (up 69% to 915,000 UVs), twittergadget.com (up 56% to 100,000 UVs), twitpic.com (up 37% to 3.33 Million UVs), and bit.ly (up 53% to 1.81 Million UVs).

Spring Fever: We know that spring is in the air when traffic flow to certain sites pick up. Pet lovers flocked to 1800petmeds.com in April (up 33% to 1.68 Million UVs), green thumbs and lawn caregivers went to scotts.com (up 46% to 710,000 UVs), and traffic to baseball sites were up sharply month over month. Mlb.com was up 62% to 12.25 Million Unique Visitors, and minorleaguebaseball.com also saw a nice bump (up 136% to 1.22 Million UVs). Red Sox Nation will be pleased to know that in addition to kicking off 2009 with 5 straight wins against the hated Yankees, the Sox also won the online traffic battle in April (367,000 UVs to redsox.com vs. 346,000 to yankees.com).

Micro-site Mania: Big upticks to some CPG and food retail micro-sites this month – who said these guys don’t spend online? Between content, contests, and coupons for consumers, some of these branders drove some serious traffic in April. The biggest food related movers included reynoldsrecycled.com (1.64 UVs) Taco Bell’s bajablast.com (up exponentially to 562,000 UVs), cicispizza.com (up 436% to 1.07 Million UVs), Hellmann’s buildtheperfectsandwich.com (up 417% to 441,000 UVs), and kfc.com (up 69% to 1.17 Million UVs).

The Easter Effect: Flower and gift sites saw a nice bump thanks to marketing around the Easter holiday. Ftd.com led the charge (up 282% to 2.73 Million UVs), with proflowers.com (up 59% to 750,000 UVs), and 1800flowers.com (up 26% to 774,000 UVs) also rising in the ranks. Godiva.com also showed a big lift (up 303% to 698,000 UVs).

We’ll keep an eye on all of these stories going forward to see what changes May will bring. In the meantime, find out how a new month of traffic has impacted site traffic, Search, and the overall internet landscape in your industry with all of Compete’s powerful tools on compete.com.

For breaking stories, real time data updates, and to participate in our cool new datanugget Fridays, be sure to follow us on Twitter!

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

Highlights this month include a strong showing from MLB.com as the basetball season got under way and the draft bringing a spike to NFL.com during the off-season.

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

Web Pro News recently took a look at Compete.com’s new look at Ad Tech in San Francisco. Check out the video of Compete’s Aaron Prebluda showing highlights of the redesign.

More WebProNews Videos

We’d love to hear your feedback on the new look - please let us know what you think!

As you may have noticed, last week we rolled out some exciting new features and functionality on compete.com. Over the next few weeks, our Product team will be writing a series of posts to shed some light on the new elements of the site, and walk through some specific usage scenarios to help you understand the value of the latest and greatest from compete.com. We welcome any feedback you have, and invite you to email our product team directly at info@compete.com. Today’s discussion addresses the new tagging system on the site.

What’s a tag?

A tag is essentially just a word-based label given to a “thing” by any user that is then viewable by all users. In the case of tags on compete.com, you’re tagging web sites with any label or description you think accurately describes the particular site for you.

Where do the tags on compete.com come from?

Put simply, the tags come from you. Anyone with a free MyCompete account can contribute tags to compete.com.

What are the rules?

There are no real “rules” for what a tag can be. For instance, you might tag linkedin.com as “jobs”, “professional-networking”, “technology”, and “b2b”; all the tags describe linkedin.com accurately, but represent different things to different users in different contexts. That’s okay: it is up to you to determine which tags make the most sense.

However, in an attempt to make tags as useful to as many users as possible, you’re only able to use A-Z, 0-9, and “-” for multi-word tags. One of the biggest problems of any tagging system is formatting the same tags in different ways (For example, Monster truck vs. Monster-truck vs. Monster Trucks). We’ve also compiled a list of words and terms deemed not “friendly” that cannot be added as tags.

We think our formatting rules are free enough to let you enter the tag you want without jeopardizing the usefulness of the entire system for the rest of the community.

Why would you want to do the work of labeling sites on compete.com?

Good Question. First, as with any tagging feature, our system gives you a way to group and organize different things (sites) with exactly the meaning you want. For example, if you want to group all the New England car dealership sites together, you can.

Second, you can help shape the collective “folksonomy” (tags version of a taxonomy) of any tag group. You can watch as the size of individual sites rises and falls based on the crowd’s opinion of their relevance in the Tag Profile.

Using all the collective brainpower and efforts of all compete.com users should produce an accurate picture of how people view different web properties that a single user could never produce. It’s a “Wisdom of the Crowds” approach for website classification.

Continue reading “The New Compete.com - Tagging Walkthrough” »

You’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here. Today, Compete and the compete.com team are excited to announce the unveiling of our new and improved site! Are we fired up? You bet we are! Here’s what we’re saying loud and clear with the brand new compete.com:

We’re changing the game!

Compete continues to take web analytics to new levels with innovative new products – the latest: User Generated Tags for sites. An industry first, we’ve rolled out user generated tags for sites on compete.com, giving you a window into the collective mind of the market.

Helpful Tip:  As a registered MyCompete member, navigate to the sites that interest you and on the lower right corner of the page, add your tags or vote up community tags. It is that simple - share and benefit from the entire compete.com community.

It’s all about you!

We’ve listened, observed, and even spoken to you on the phone - you are our #1 priority. The new compete.com interface was designed to get you the important data that you need to quickly and easily make decisions.

Helpful Tip:  Site Analytics is now named Site Profiles! Find detailed data on a single domain or use the Compare Sites report to benchmark across multiple domains. Search Analytics, Referral Analytics and Ranked Lists are all updated as well!

A little sizzle makes the data taste that much better!

Dynamic flash graphs, drill-down date selection, multiple axes, and a smooth new user interface brings Compete’s powerful data to life. We’ve added the ability to look at traffic and engagement data on the same graph, such as unique visitors and pages per visit.

Helpful Tip:  Compare myspace.com’s UV’s to Pages per Visit. It is a great example of traffic trending downward for MySpace, but visitors looking at more pages per visit – looks like the core audience is hanging around longer than ever.

Data rocks!

We love tracking our competitors, and you do too – with our new daily digests (available to Compete PRO subscribers), you can get daily share-based data delivered to your desktop every morning. Just create portfolios of the sites that you want to track, and we’ll deliver a daily update of the most important metrics directly to your inbox.

Helpful Tip:  If you are a PRO subscriber, run a Site Comparison report. Just below the “Compare” button click on “Add to Portfolio.” Once created, make sure that your email preferences for “compete.com Portfolio Digest” are turned on to receive Daily Digests. That’s it!

And we’re just getting started!

2009 is shaping up to be a big year for people who need data to identify opportunities in a tight market, and Compete is breaking down those walls for you. We have already begun working on the next BIG release (which of course you will see first) and it is another doozy.  In the meantime, we invite you to dig into the new compete.com, and send along any feedback that you have on the new site.

Best wishes,
The Compete team