Can
I find out my competitor's traffic?
Q. Our minister told me that I can find out how
much traffic my competitors get. Do you know how to do this?
A. It's impossible to find out how much traffic
your competitors get unless they somehow have their log file
statistics out in the open. Sites such as Alexa.com can give you
some comparative data, but they will never give you the exact
amount of traffic that your competitors receive.
The only sites you can get that info from are those to
which you have log file access, or those on which you have
installed some tracking code. Nobody can just install this sort of
thing on their competitors' sites, as they'd need server access to
do so.
Added note: After this question was answered in
the newsletter, I received several replies letting me know of some
tools that could in fact provide you with some competitive
analysis. Joe Morin from Boost Search Marketing, wrote the
following: "I would say that there are several tools that can
give you that exact data such as Comscore data that takes a
toolbar sampling of certain demographics (by their assigned user
base) and then applies their own popularity algorithm to determine
traffic figures to a pretty accurate assumption even tracking
where traffic comes from (sites) and where they go to afterwards,
something that no analytics programs have been able to ascertain.
Also Hitwise analyzes traffic from all of the major ISPs gathering
traffic data at the server level so I can examine competitor
traffic and even see what keywords they are deriving their traffic
from and from what search engines."
