Recently, Slate Magazine released an article comparing the coffee brews of Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, and McDonalds. Surprisingly, the coffee shop whose biz is dedicated to coffee first came in last. Starbucks was the worst rated, next to McDononald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts was the winner.

People are passionate about their coffee and the rivalry between Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts definitely runs deep. My first thought was that these results were impacted by marketing efforts and reach, but when looking at online engagement and traffic to each of their websites this is not the case. Starbucks.com is indeed the more engaging, not to mention it garners about 80% more UV’s than Dunkindonuts.com monthly.

What’s your take?

Similar to the fast food burger rivalries, seemingly everyone has an opinion about which pizza is the best (Papa John’s). Many take pride in finding the little mom and pop shops that have the best sauce (Fortunato’s, Baltimore), but when it comes to the national level, three establishments have outpaced the rest; Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Papa John’s.

Monthly unique visitor traffic to these three sites remains relatively close, but aside from a short fluctuation late last year the pecking order has been set. So we look to where sites often turn to when trying to make up ground on the competition - search.

Papa John’s falls back to the pack when it comes to search, with sites like Yahoo! and Facebook ranking ahead of them. It’s not from lack of trying (a.k.a. paid search) though - 30% of Papa John’s search referrals in June came from paid clickthroughs, as opposed to 21% for Pizza Hut’s and 11% for Domino’s. Maybe people just don’t agree with me that better ingredients mean better pizza, or maybe convenience is king and the 2,600-plus Papa John’s locations in the U.S. just can’t compete with Pizza Hut’s more than 6,200.

I’ve am a long-time member of Blockbuster’s online rental program and have been shouting from my soapbox that its in-store exchange policy makes the Blockbuster program a better alternative than Netflix. My argument took a hit recently when I was welcomed by a sign on the door of my local Blockbuster store that read, “50% off all movies. No rentals at this location.” This is the second time in the past year that I’ve gone to exchange a movie at a Blockbuster brick-and-mortar and found it closed or closing.

Without stores at which to do in-store exchanges, it doesn’t seem like there is much incentive to choose Blockbuster over Netflix. There has always been a loyal Netflix following online, but just how dominant are they now?

In the last two years, Netflix has gone from just over double Blockbuster’s traffic to almost eight and a half times as much. In fact, nearly as many unique visitors went to the member’s section to manage their Netflix Watch Now online viewing queue as went to the entire Blockbuster site last month. Unique Visitor traffic numbers are only part of overall site performance, but engagement metrics tell the same story.

In the past Blockbuster had kept pace with Netflix in terms of user engagement, but it seems that Netfix has pulled away recently in these categories as well. Over the past two years Visits per Person has gone from a back and forth battle between the two sites to yet another run-away victory, with Netflix users going to the site one and a half times more than Blockbuster users. Blockbuster still held the advantage in Average Stay as recently as March, but the sites have gone in opposite directions since then, with Netflix users staying nearly 3 minutes more per visit than Blockbuster.

Netflix completes the overall head-to-head dominance by grabbing over 33% of search referrals for the term ‘movie rental,’ compared to Blockbuster’s 19%. Redbox.com also enters the conversation here, with a solid 13% despite not actually renting movies online.

Now with no convenient place to exchange my movies in person, I may have to finally give in and join the nearly 20 million strong at Neflix.

Every time I’ve been trying to decide on a new place to go with friends recently, someone has inevitably said, “Check it out on Yelp,” but rarely has anyone suggested that we use Citysearch too. This sentiment seems to be reflected in the web traffic, with the perennial leader in local restaurant/entertainment reviews no longer alone at the top.

Through the end of last year Citysearch held a significant lead, but Yelp has closed the Unique Visitors gap in early ‘09 and already has Citysearch beaten out in several key engagement metrics.

Visitors to Yelp stay longer, view more content and come back more often - sounds like a recipe for success. We’ll keep an eye on this an see if Yelp can ride their dominant engagement to the UV lead in the coming months.

Earlier this month, Compete reported that Facebook overtook MySpace in Unique Visitors trafficking to the site:

Sure, this was a symbolic takeover, but it should have come as no surprise to anyone closely monitoring the two social giants over the past year.

Using a few different Compete PRO Site Analytics reports, I drilled down to take a closer look at trended traffic to understand the key metrics around Facebook’s rise to power in the social media arena.

The First Blow: October 2007 - Stickiness

While Unique Visitor data is certainly newsworthy, given Social Media’s value proposition to advertisers from an engagement perspective, the stickiness metrics are arguably more important than high level site traffic alone. Looking at historical engagement data, I rolled back the clock to October 2007, where we see Facebook eclipsing MySpace in the number of pages per visit for a visitor. This would prove to be the first of many battles won by Facebook along the way.

Round 2: Reach

Examining Daily Reach (people visiting a site on a given day as a percentage of all internet users on that day) over the past 6 months, we see that on January 4th, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of Reach, surging forward in February to achieve a remarkable 15% (and climbing) Reach vs. 11% for MySpace.

Round 3: Attention

In terms of time spent, Monthly Attention (percentage of time spent on a site as a percentage of total time spent online) illustrates Facebook’s robust growth over the last year. In early 2008, approximately 7% of all time spent online was on MySpace (vs. 1.5% for Facebook), but as the year rolled along, Facebook gained more and more attention, eventually overtaking MySpace in October. As of January 2009, 5% of all time spent online was on Facebook, more than double MySpace.

The Knockout Punch?: Average Stay

If you’re MySpace, the graph below certainly stings – in the past two years, average stay for a visitor to the site has dropped from 30 minutes to 10 minutes. In the meantime, Facebook has steadily upped this number, leaving its rival in the dust. As of January 2009, Facebook kept visitors engaged on site over 7 minutes longer on average than MySpace, with the average stay still on the rise.

What will the rest of 2009 bring for both of these sites? The Compete team will continue to track the story going forward, but in the meantime, get in on the action yourself on compete.com.

Coke and Pepsi have been locked in battle on many fronts for decades and the Super Bowl goes a long way in deciding which of the two has the upper hand. Both had success with memorable ads in 2008; Pepsi’s Justin Timberlake ad and Coke’s Parade Balloons (as a Patriots fan, the ads are the only part of that game I want to remember).

Each company had three commercials during this year’s Super Bowl, leading to a predictable spike in site traffic on the day of the game. Coke managed to keep that momentum going through to Monday, whereas Pepsi saw a steep drop.

But things were not all bad for Pepsi. Unlike Coke, which did not include any references to their online channels in the ads, Pepsi pushed their new refresheverything.com site in two of their three commercials and the graph looks quite a bit different with it included. Though the site wasn’t started solely for the Super Bowl (it began with a campaign to voice your concerns in a video-letter to the President and got a boost from its Facebook page), the massive exposure from the game helped maintain its momentum and keep the daily Reach numbers high and trending upwards.

One of Coke’s ads featured people in public being viewed as animated characters, reminiscent of online avatars and gaming, yet they failed to build on that association by driving viewers online. Instead it seems that Pepsi seized the opportunity to further engage consumers with their new site at a time when integrated cross-channel marketing is more important than ever.