Comparing our traffic to competitors -- tools?

[BobGW]

Are there any good free tools that can track our traffic compared with 2 competitors? We're lookimg for a (rough) graph. We don't have Google Analytics installed yet.

[eyepaq]

As free tools your best bet will be Alexa. But you will need data from your website (google analytics for example) and Alexa numbers for your website in order to do an assessment for the competitors based only on Alexa numbers.

Alexa.com is not very reliable but if you are in the US, for a US market is closing in to the real numbers in most of the niches pretty well.

Hope it helps.

[anthonydnelson]

Besides Alexa, mentioned by eyepaq, here are some tools to consider:

http://www.compete.com

http://www.semrush.com

http://ahrefs.com/labs/domain-comparison/

http://www.quantcast.com

All of these are traffic estimations to a point. You can look at a few and probably come to some accurate conclusions on how things are trending, but not actual accurate numbers.

[MagicDude4Eva]

I honestly would not use Alexa - their stats are substantially lower than what Google will give you. Google Trends for Websites (http://trends.google.com/websites) might be a better option.

You might also get a rough understanding of SEM spent via Google Adplanner.

[CMC-SD]

We use SEMrush to get a general idea. They project search engine traffic based on KW volume and position. The numbers are wrong, but the proportions are usually close; e.g., they think we had 20k visitors in March and 10k visitors in April, and we actually had 40k visitors in March and 20k visitors in April. It will get you in the right order of magnitude, at least.