Calvert Creative

Every smart business with an online presence should be watching their own website statistics to see how and when visitors are using their site. Your own server-side stats, along with Google Analytics and Alerts are three simple and free ways to begin monitoring usage and statistics on any web properties you own.

But are you also following web stats on partner and competitor sites?

You can get several pieces of key information about any website with the use of a couple of free browser tools that you can download and begin using today.

I use the Quirk Search Status and Compete profile and browser extensions for Firefox (http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ and http://tools.compete.com — this is three separate downloads from two locations). These give me access to a wide range of data, including Alexa rank (I’ve heard that this number is inaccurate if a site uses more than one server), Compete rank, mozRank, people count, growth over time, and so on. These will all give you a basic sense of how a site is faring, and you can read up on what things these particular statistics include on their related websites.

Keep in mind as you begin that every tool will give you a slightly different number depending on the formula that tool uses to calculate data. I’ve found that Google Analytics gives the most conservative count, so I tend to work with that number the most when monitoring my own site numbers, and I keep the difference between GA’s analysis and the way the other tools report my site data in mind as I look at competitor sites.