5 Free Tools to Analyze Your Competitor’s Traffic

We are pretty aware of how Google analytics tool helps us counting incoming traffic to our website. It is easy and quick. However, can you check traffic to a website that you don’t own?  Are there any tools that can help you understand traffic to your competitor website or any website that you like?

Yes, it is possible. There are lots of free as well as paid tools you can use to know the number of traffic and their sources. Of course, there will be certain variations in counts as you move from one tool to another. Although, you will get an idea about the kind of traffic a website has. As evidenced, this number is close to the original traffic count that Google analytics report says.

A number of website owners and bloggers use such tools to determine traffic of other websites on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. Some of the popular traffic estimating websites are Google Adplanner, Compete, Alexa, Quantcast and BuySellAds.

Let us see how they work.

Google Adplanner:

Google Adplanner provides accurate and detailed traffic details of a website in a specific country or territory. The traffic estimator from Google provides essential traffic metrics such as average page visit per visitor,  average time spend on the site, number of unique visitors, total page views, total visitors in a month and more.

To start with it open this link http://www.google.com/adplanner/  in your browser and enter the  website URL in the search box  that you want to analyze. You will get  detailed traffic information including a list of top keywords and demographic details. The results available  are close to the data derived from Google analytics. Such tool can be handy for analyzing the real worth of  a blog or a website, no matter you have the site access or not.

Alexa.com :

Visit Alexa.com and type a website address that you want to search for. Alexa provides important metrics such as Alexa traffic rank (both global and regional specific), Reach, total pageviews, page views per user, bounce rate, average time spent on site, search analytics (percentage of search traffic),  audience profile, linking status, site’s demographics, top search queries, reputation analysis and more.

Using Alexa.com you can compare your own site with 4 other competitor’s websites . Although the data available from Alexa is not accurate , you can always have your own predictions. Alexa takes into account only those user reviews who have uploaded Alexa toolbar in their browser. Sites with less traffic don’t show any result in Alexa. Many advertisers and industry experts still prefer using Alexa statistics for initial review.

Compete.com:

This website gathers information from US users only. You can simply open a free account over there and access to the traffic details generated by US websites. Compete.com has an active database of 200000 US users that they use to predict website  traffic and user engagement metrics. If you want to analyze a competitor’s site that has global traffic , compete.com may not help you much in this. If a site has little traffic Compete may not show any result.

Quantcast.com :

This is another website traffic estimating tool that is quite popular among internet users. Quantcast provides traffic details based on the database and resource they have. Though this tool does not give accurate traffic details you can always use it for initial judgements.

BuySellAds.com:

This is an ad network that sells banner advertisements on  affiliate sites  and blogs. You have to install BuySellAds script on a website or blog and get traffic estimates. The data available from the BSA is close to the actual traffic estimate. BSA provides a pool of information including estimated impressions, Alexa rank, Compete Rank, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, Google Pagerank and SeoMoz rank of a website.

If you know more such websites that are good for competitor analysis please share it in the comment section below. To know more about competitor’s keyword and ranking analysis you may ask a professional from Chesterfield SEO company.