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Compete.com Review

Written on March 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo

Compete takes pricing to a different level but has some unique features as well. They have a few different pricing levels but to get all the features you need to dial it up at $499 per month. Although, some of their lower price points may provide good value depending on what you might use them for.

Compete Site Profiles

Here is how compete gets their data.

Here is a screen shot of their site profile overlay

It’s kind of like a semi-analytics program view of things which includes:

• Unique Visitors
• Page Views
• Average Stay
• Demographic Info
• Link through’s to Referral and Search Analytics (discussed further down)

Data is available in 7 day, 30 day, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year increments.

The audience profile tab is similar to quantcast and is only available to the verified site owner (unless the site has made it’s info public) and the sub-domain tab shows sub-domains associated with the main domain.

Enterprise users, where there is no standard pricing listed…also get access to category profiles and behavioral categories as shown below:

You also get the option to compare up to 5 sites at once in their site profile section

Those are the options in the profiles section. These statistics are far beyond what most traditional spy tools offer and can be very useful when comparing large sites as small sites do not fare very well with these types of data sets (this is not specific to compete, it’s pretty much industry wide).

Analytics Tools

Compete’s second tool set is the Analytics Tools set. Here you can search through Search Analytics (keywords) and Referral Analytics (sites referring traffic to the domain) as well as a variety of Ranked Lists.

Referral Analytics

This is pretty sweet as you can see what search engines the site’s SEO campaign is doing well in, as well as possible advertising opportunities for your site.

It also will show you Destination sites (where users go after landing on the site you are reviewing.)

In addition to messing around with some of the filters you can take a peek at historical data (trends, seasonal, etc) as noted here.

Ranked Lists

Compete offers ranked lists which you can filter in a few easy steps

Compete lets you look at ranked lists via 3 steps (one from each)

• Step 1 - unique visitors, visits, page views, time spent, monthly attention
• Step 2 - site ranking, ranking + unique visitors, ranking + all metrics
• Step 3 - top 200, 1,000, 15,000, 100,000, 500,000 domains

Search Analytics

Compete’s Search Analytics show keywords referring traffic to a site (or two) with some pretty neat metrics:

• Highly Engaging Keywords - Keywords that make up 40% of the total time index and have a referral share greater than 0.01%
• High Traffic Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of the search referral share
• Paid Keywords
• Natural Keywords
• Engaging Long Tail Keywords - Keywords making up the bottom 60% of search referral share, with a total time index of > .10
• Enthusiast Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of Average Time Index and a Search Referral Share greater than 0.01
• Long Tail Keywords
• Total Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term where the searcher came from…that made up the highest total time spent on the site for ALL visits.
• Average Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term which resulted in the most average time per visit spent on the site.

You can also compare 2 sites like so:

In Closing

The high price point of Compete might scare some users away, but consider that their data is not just relying on scraped Google/Yahoo/Bing results then extrapolated by some internal metrics. Compete is probably more useful to those who “compete” in really competitive markets with some sites as competition, although it can be useful to folks who may be involved in less competitive SERPS with smaller sites as competitors because they can use this data to investigate larger sites in their market, which may not be competitors but could yield helpful industry data.

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Compete.com Review

ISpionage Review

Written on March 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

iSpionage is a newer player in the spy tool market. They are much more PPC oriented than organic SEO oriented. They offer 3 tool sets:

• Keyword and Domain Research
• Keyword Monitor
• PPC Campaign Builder

Keyword and Domain Research

They index the top ten results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing (although I only saw G and Y).

They give you breakdowns of common spy tool elements such as:

• Competitors and Overlapping Keywords
• Ad Copy
• Keyword Specific Ads
• CPC
• Average Search Volume
• Average Rank
• And so on..

The one really neat thing they offer is overlapping keywords between Yahoo and Google for a particular domain. I’m not aware of another spy tool that does that.

Their database does not seem to be very deep but they are newer so that’s to be expected.

The do show overlapping keywords, total keyword count, and a monthly budget under their competition tab.

Here is another spot where they compare Google and Yahoo, this time for overlapping keywords between sites.

Keyword Monitor

This lets you search by domain name or keyword to get ideas for keywords to add into your campaign. You can also add your own manually after the keyword research option. Keyword Monitor will show you the following for your campaign + competition:

The impression share is not something I’ve noticed in most other tools and the other 4 metrics can be useful in determining which competitor might be a bit savior in the PPC game. Other metrics they will show you on the keyword level include whether or not the keyword has direct ranking affiliates, the average CPC/search volume, and total advertiser counts in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

The tool also shows you related keywords you may wish to add to your campaign or just place on your watch list.

PPC Campaign Builder

The campaign builder allows you to search for keywords via a keyword or domain name input. The steps are as follows:

Keyword Clean Up

This is where you can weed out keywords that contain certain words, are duplicates, or have special characters. You can also choose to remove extra spaces if needed.

Keyword Grouping

Here you can set up ad groups and campaigns right from within iSpionage. It also gives you the option to create one ad group per keyword if you want to get that granular

Campaign Builder

Here you can input bid prices for Broad/Phrase/Exact match bids, set up your ads, and input the url. Then you can export for use in Google, Yahoo, or Bing PPC campaigns.

In Closing

iSpionage has some promise and seems to be much more into the PPC market than the SEO market. If that’s the case then they are taking on some pretty big players as many of the spy tools offer both PPC and SEO data sets. They have some unique features and it will be interesting to see how they develop their product going forward.

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ISpionage Review

Stat Rant: Does Facebook Trumps Google For News & Can’t We Measure Twitter Correctly?

Written on March 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Earlier this week, Hitwise put out stats suggesting that Facebook is beating Google and Twitter when it comes to driving traffic to news sites. I dug a little deeper, and I beg to differ. Along the way, some pokes at the need to more digging into stats in general.
The Hitwise blog post reported that Twitter [...]



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Stat Rant: Does Facebook Trumps Google For News & Can’t We Measure Twitter Correctly?

Twitter Working On ‘Most Popular Tweets’ Search Project

Written on March 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Twitter’s search team is working on a project to uncover the most popular tweets for any search query, but it’s unclear when or where the project might be implemented.
Taylor Singletary, a Developer Advocate at Twitter, announced and described the project today in a post on the Twitter API Announcements group.
The Search team is working on [...]



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Twitter Working On ‘Most Popular Tweets’ Search Project

Social Media Tactics Still Learning to Play Well With Others

Written on March 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Social media is on the front of every marketer’s mind (or at least it seems that way) but it still gets the treatment normally reserved for those who don’t quite fit in. In other words, while there is tremendous value in social media it is still a tough road to travel to get social efforts integrated with traditional marketing campaigns. The techniques voted “Most Likely to be Siloed” include third party social networking site, blogs and microblogs. While all the talk centers on these areas there is still considerable concern about how well they play with other elements of marketing campaigns and just how to best help them fit in.

eMarketer tells of a report done by Unica which is a marketing management firm. Here are the numbers from this particular study.

So what’s the hold up? Why is it that many of the most active, important and vastly utilized social media activities are still considered persona non grata when looking at the overall effect of marketing efforts?

My theory is that it I just a matter of TMI. When anyone has too much of anything it becomes difficult to manage. When it comes to data social media activities like Twitter, Facebook and blogs generate so much information that it can bury even the most seasoned marketer.

When asked how all of this data impacts other marketing efforts it becomes extremely difficult to isolate the true cause and effect relationships that C-level marketers want to see. Of course, the general lack of knowledge of these marketing vehicles the further you go up the marketing food chain creates an even greater issue.

In your experience are you seeing the same kind of difficulty in truly integrating your core social media efforts with the rest of your marketing campaigns? What ways have you found to bridge this gap to help social media get out of the silo and in with the rest of the marketing efforts?

Share your experience with us openly. You won’t be giving away any secrets. Besides, it’s Friday and most people will forget what they read by Monday anyway.

On that note, have a great weekend!

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Social Media Tactics Still Learning to Play Well With Others

Will Google Leave China On April 10th Forever?

Written on March 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

Bloomberg News reports Google may be pulling out of China as soon as April 10th. Bloomberg then later added that if they do pull out, it will likely be “permanent.”
Bloomberg News references reports from the China Business News paper, where they said Google will likely announce their plans to pull out officially on March [...]



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Will Google Leave China On April 10th Forever?

Managing PPC Accounts: Improving Bounce Rates

Written on March 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, Object, book, seo

Paid advertising has morphed into so much more than buying some traffic until your SEO can sustain  your site. There are now software programs that can create a unique landing page for (thousands of) keywords on the fly, specifically designed to address the keyword phrase the user typed into the query box and the ad [...]



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Managing PPC Accounts: Improving Bounce Rates

John Battelle On The Future Of Search

Written on March 19, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

As soon as I decided I wanted to explore the question of where search was going, I knew sooner or later I had to talk to John Battelle. John wrote what I still consider the definitive look at the industry, The Search, in 2005. Since then, in addition to running Federated Media, he has continued [...]



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John Battelle On The Future Of Search

Overlooked But Beneficial On-Page SEO Elements

Written on March 18, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

In my previous article I described the value of meta tags in driving organic rankings. In this article, I will review some other secondary “on-page” elements that—if used properly—may contribute to your site ranking more effectively in organic search results.
It’s important to note that these on-page elements actually play a very important role in creating [...]



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Overlooked But Beneficial On-Page SEO Elements

Google-Viacom Court Documents Out; Google Says Viacom ‘Secretly’ Uploaded Videos

Written on March 18, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

The three-year-old lawsuit in which Viacom is seeking $1 billion from Google over copyrighted videos on YouTube moved a step forward today with the release of several court documents. The three documents unsealed today are:

Viacom: Memorandum in support of motion for partial summary judgment (2.7mb PDF)
Viacom: Statement of undisputed facts (5mb PDF)
Google: Memorandum in support [...]



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Google-Viacom Court Documents Out; Google Says Viacom ‘Secretly’ Uploaded Videos