Compete is one of the leaders in web traffic analysis, perhaps best known for publishing the approximate number of global visitors to the top one million web sites. And while Google Analytics is great to understand your site's traffic, bounce rate and more, it doesn't tell you about what your competitors are doing or how that consumer ended up there in the first place. That's what Compete is trying to change.
Compete Senior Director of Marketing Aaron Smolick and I sat down this week at the 2010 Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston (#IMS10 for the Twitter-savvy) to talk about his company's offerings, why deeper analytics continue to be vital in business, and how to convert traffic to customers.
Compete has been around as a company since 2000, but how has your organization changed?
At the core, we are a competitive web analytics company that allows any person, small business or big brand to monitor online traffic and consumer behavior. We match data from our two million person panel with our digital insights expertise to create a holistic view of the online space - and that gives our users a clear competitive advantage. To answer your question, Compete's biggest changes over the last few years have to be the growing array of products we offer to different segments of the online world. We are also in the middle of a very healthy growth cycle which is allowing us to reach more clients, create a bigger pipeline of products and grow our global initiatives.
Why should people use your tools instead of other offerings?
As our universe grows more digital, marketers are finding that traditional research is not comprehensive or timely enough to improve their advertising, engagement or return on investment (ROI). While consumers are shopping, socializing, viewing and even creating their own media online, existing audience measurement currencies are not keeping pace. The old way simply doesn't work in the new world. Compete takes the guessing out of the online executions and with billions of dollars flowing into the online space, brand managers, small business owners and individuals are demanding to know what effects their activations are having on consumers.
Compete's data methodology and our online panel, the largest in the industry, allows us to collect data on more sites and reach a level of granularity that our competition can't see. Compete's methodology uses the multiple individual sources that comprise our panel to normalize, calibrate, and project accurate audience and engagement metrics. No other panel can represent highly fragmented online audiences as effectively as the Compete panel.
Our partnerships with Omniture, Fox Audience Network, GroupM MIG, Kantar Retail and J.D. Power help to connect the dots with valuable purchasing data. Our relationships with Kantar and WPP have allowed us to continually invest in new online measurement initiatives, evolve our data methodology and pave the way for our global platform.
How would you describe your product offerings?
We're continually striving to measure the online world with cutting-edge products and industry approved privacy standards. Our products offer solutions for audience insight, competitive intelligence, marketing and online channel effectiveness, ad effectiveness and media planning. This spectrum of product offerings is designed for almost any person at any level. At one end of the product spectrum is the free compete.com tool that allows anyone to view basic website metrics. On the other end are our custom studies, which bigger brands prefer to use.
In addition to our physical product offerings, we have a team of experts that support the digital strategies of leading brands in the automotive, consumer electronics, financial services, packaged goods, pharmaceutical, retail, telecom, and travel markets. Compete's media and agency team works closely with the largest advertising, media and direct marketing agencies and the fastest growing search engines, portals, ad networks and publishers.
In terms of individuals at a company, who should be using your tools?
Everyone who wants to be on the cutting-edge of marketing and advertising, period. The traditional way of marketing and advertising is slowly being replaced with digital technology and online execution. I personally think that traditional marketing will always be around, but technology will start connecting all the dots in a lot more places than you think. As a marketer, you have to understand how the online world works, how it is measured and how to optimize your marketing dollars. You also have to understand what your consumers are doing online, the sites they visit before and after yours and how to convert your online traffic into sales.
It seems like everyone talks about wanting deeper analytics for their own use and for their advertisers. Why do they matter more now?
The smartest marketers do nothing without first measuring results, which makes digital insights the new currency. At the end of the day, it is the marketer's job to produce concrete results and if you are not armed with latest online technology, then I'm guessing your competitors are. The deeper digital insights you have, the better understanding you have of your customer. By using Compete products, you will have all of the information that you need to make educated decisions to optimize your online campaign, increase market share and dominate the competition.
A large thank you to Aaron for his time and insights. To find out more about Compete, go to www.compete.com. They answer almost any question you could have there.