Here are three free analysis tools you can use to learn more about your competitors, your industry and your online communities.
Alexa is owned by Amazon.com and is a useful free tool if you are looking for benchmarking information regarding websites.
It’s can be useful to find the leading sites in topics or niches, but you need to know that the site visitor rankings on Alexa are gleaned from information sent to Alexa through the Alexa toolbar used by some people in their web browser.
It’s hard to get accurate stats on the number of Alexa toolbar users, so Alexa rankings are an interesting guide only and not reliable on their own.
With Alexa, you can find the most popular sites in three ways, by global ranking, by category or by country. It also gives you a wide range of information about a site including a description of the site, who owns the site, where it is located and a lot more.
Alexa allows you to monitor how popular a certain site is compare to yours, provides you what terms your competition is using to get traffic and shows you the kind of visitors your competition are attracting.
You can use the Site Info search to compare up to 5 different websites.
Google Trends is a free tool allowing you to analyze trends when you search for keywords or popular websites.
The results will show you how the search popularity of the keywords or sites has changed over a period of time.
You can narrow the search down to selected countries and sub-regions within countries.
You can also compare multiple search terms.
AdPlanner is a free tool run by Doubleclick advertising network, part of Google.
The tool is intended for planning ad campaigns but you can also use it for some interesting competitor analysis research.
It allows you to search information about a specific website, and provides you the traffic statistics of that site, the trend status of their daily unique visitors, number of visitors base on specific age group, gender, household income and education.It also allows you to see the audience interest and ad placements.
In addition, AdPlanner suggests other similar websites that you can use for comparison.
There are other tools out there, but these are a good way to start your benchmarking. We’ll keep adding to this, so please let us know other tools and resources you find useful.
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