Compete.com & Market research

[CharlieB]

Hi

I've been doing some market research on some potential rival business to one i'm looking start up. As its an online business ive been looking at website hits to gauge how popular they are. I've used compete.com and it says that they're only getting a few hundred hits a month when I was expecting a lot more. I'm wondering how accurate compete.com is and if theres another website to monitor traffic which would be more accurate?

If this is true is it a case of lamb to the slaughter by setting up when rivals are only getting a few hundred hits even if I have a USP?

Is this the best way to conduct market research for websites? (by monitoring the hits) or is there a better way?

Thanks

Charlie

[kcosta45]

Hi Charlie,

I'm the marketing manager for Compete. My recommendation for comparing sites would be to look for websites that have 25K unique visitors per month to get a proper gauge of their competitive benchmarks. Because Compete.com is recommended for the top 15 thousand websites, smaller websites, like startups are often have samples too small for our panel to measure. If you have competitors that are much larger or in the same industry, Compete.com can be helpful for identifying industry trends with historical data.

Other ways you could use the Compete.com tool would be to do keyword research for SEO and SEM while setting up your website, identifying referral and destination traffic, and category data. I hope this is helpful to you. If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Best,
Karen Nicole Costa