Avinash wrote a great summary of competitive intelligence tools (CIs) and other good “market” data sources on his blog the other day, and it’s a must-read.

We’ve been saying for years that all of these tools come with caveats, but people still look at tools like comscore and think that the numbers are real.  In truth, they’re often nowhere close.

Where the majority of competitive intelligence tools shine is in scalar measurement: what % up or down did we see in the data?  Comscore, unless you’re talking about a mega-popular site, is a pretty terrible tool for measuring traffic levels, unique visitor levels, page views, actions, etc.  It is, however, a good tool for seeing the percentage change of all of these things. While the small population it uses to measure audience behavior might not be a good sample size to get volume, it is a good sample of how these trends rise and fall.

Tools like Hitwise rely on ISP data, or data collected by the services you connect to the internet through. They typically have a sample size that is much higher (about 100X comscore), but they don’t get the same depth of data from a behavioral standpoint.

What’s the best tool for finding out how much traffic your competitor has? Twitter. Follow their marketing and web analytics people.  They brag about their traffic and complain about their problems all the time. Make friends with a web analytics person over there, and they might voice their frustrations and ask you about yours. Hey, data sources are data sources.

Don’t forget to pay Avinash’s site a visit, though.  He goes into a lot of detail.

I’m going to be up at SMX Toronto / eMetrics Toronto in early April.  These are great conferences and you should go, too.

If you’re going to go, use this SMX discount code and save some Canadian dollars: SEDISCOVER15.

I’m going to be on a panel, so it’s not exactly a keynote, but it should be a fun discussion on important metrics for SEO and search in general.  What should you be looking at, how to interpret it, and how to avoid the pitfalls.

Here’s the description from the SMX Toronto site:

Search Analytics

[SA-2] Defining SEO and PPC Measures for Success
SEO and PPC campaigns offer unmatched opportunities for measurement, testing and refining. However, to fully take advantage of these opportunities we need to define the metrics, points of conversion, content consumption or actions completed that indicate success. In this session advanced SEM professionals will discuss how Success Metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are determined and show examples of how KPI are used both real time and historically to measure the efficiency of a campaign, the success of SEO, or the real time results of an integrated marketing program.

I’m doing a webinar next Wednesday, 2/24 at brighttalk (the date has changed!).  It’s titled “why the middle matters,” and I’ll be discussing how you can look at analytics to figure out why things are they way they are in your search campaigns.

Hope you can join me!  It’ll also be recorded, so you can watch it even if you miss it.

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/8405/attend