Taking A Competitive Snapshot

[Steve Bennett]

Compete.com is a web analytics startup that has some interesting features that are worth mentioning as they:

claim to have a diverse sample of 2,000,000+ U.S. Internet users that have given them permission to analyse the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys
have built an online competitive intelligence service that lets you compare websites in seconds.
Sounds interesting but I thought that it would have no relevance to Australia as Compete say they only have U.S. users. But I thought I would give it a go anyway.
On the left is the snapshot produced when comparing Commbank, NAB and ING Direct Australia (well to be accurate: just the websites commbank.com.au, nab.com.au and ingdirect.com.au). Click on this picture to open a larger version.

Visitor numbers do seem to reflect the U.S. centricity of the sample but I can see that the search terms and referral information could be useful for the marketing department to tune their site (SEO).

The only similar service that I know of that does cover Australia is bwired (a local web technology company). They don't have an out-of-the-box solution but (if you can find it) they offer an online website comparison called RISE.

With RISE, you fill in a form telling RISE about how you think a target website performs against 20 or so criteria. RISE then emails a short report back to you comparing the target to both a composite group of competitors and a set of 3 anonymous competitors.

Here is the report generated for ingdirect.com.au. The report is based on my responses to the RISE questionnaire as a non-customer who explored the website - NOT on any particular insiders information on how ING Direct performs as an organisation. Here is the report:

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