How to Determine Traffic at a Competing Site
Is there a way to know in real time how many visitors come to a specific site, without help from that website? Yes there is, according to Dr. Ralph Wilson's Web Marketing Today newsletter.
The doc says there are four ways to determine traffic. Three companies monitor traffic to websites and sell this information to their clients, though some information on the highest traffic sites is sometimes displayed for free. These companies are:
comScore Media Metrix (www.comscore.com/metrix)
Nielsen//NetRatings (www.nielsen-netratings.com)
Hitwise (www.hitwise.com)
You may have to purchase data from comScore or Nielsen//NetRatings. If you can't afford their data, you can get a relative idea of traffic to a site by using Alexa (www.alexa.com). This service, owned by Amazon, ranks websites on the basis of traffic, #1 being high. They don't tell you absolute numbers of unique visitors, however. For such an estimate, find the traffic rankings (in press releases, etc.) of the sites just above and below your site of interest in the Alexa ranking, and its relative traffic will be between those numbers.
