Compete.com updates some services and revokes others.
Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator
As an Online Marketer, I appreciate having a variety of free online analytics tools, including Quantcast, Compete, Alexa, and Google Insights and Trends. I use these tools on a daily basis to gather research for potential clients, monitor trends for current clients and keep myself and my team up-to-date in the ever changing world of the internet. So when I heard from a colleague that Compete had made some upgrades to its site, I immediately went to the site to see what changed.
The homepage of Compete clearly announces the modifications to “the new compete.com.” These updates include:
“Enhanced UI- An upgraded and simplified user interface makes utilizing and interacting with Compete PRO data easier.
User Generated Tagging- Tagging allows you to categorize sites as well as understand how other users/consumers define a site, brand, or product.
Improved Graphing- New and improved graphing tools allow you to compare multiple datasets on a single graph.
Daily Digest Emails- Data on sites of interest to you delivered to you inbox daily.”
My excitement for these improvements was put to an abrupt halt as I noticed several metrics were no longer available for free. Average stay and pages per visit are only now available if you pay a fee to get the PRO service. This was very disappointing to discover as I find that these two metrics are the most useful when comparing sites. This is especially significant in the case of regionalized companies to national companies. While local companies do compete with national chains, ultimately the national chains have more traffic and visitors to their sites. With data such as average stay and pages per visit, we are able to compare apples-to-apples when looking at what audiences do once they get to a site. How long a user is browsing your site can tell a company how sticky or interactive their site is.
While it’s great that these tools are free, Quantcast, and Google Insights Google Trends does not provide this depth of information as well. Alexa does include these detailed metrics in its repertoire, however its interface is not as user-friendly as Compete. Compete.com’s meta description explains that they help users “by providing free services.” With these “upgrades,” the majority of the services Compete provides need to be accessed with a credit card. Perhaps they forgot to update the description when they upgraded their site.
