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Source:CenterNetworks

Back during my corporate days, we subscribed to the competitive analysis Web services that Hitwise offers. Basically you can see data about your site, upstream and downstream traffic, industry traffic, etc. If I remember, each category was $5k/year (might have been more not 100% sure). The data was great (though it wasn’t always accurate) and I enjoyed studying the reports.

Today Google’s Trends application has added Websites to their free offering. You can now enter a Web site into Google Trends and it gives you back information on unique visitors from Google searches (only a relative graph, no actual numbers), location information, "also visited" and "also searched for". Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has an in-depth review which every Internet marketer must read.

Note that if you sign-in on Google Trends, you see more detailed information including numbers on the graph.

Now to be fair, this is only for search traffic so it won’t kill Hitwise’s product offering, just injure them slightly. Theis new Google offering sure does provide a massive amount of free data. You can see what your competitors are doing in search and where their site visitors are heading to. It’s also something to consider for organic SEO purposes.

Here’s the CenterNetworks chart:

As expected, U.S. is first in search traffic to CN. I would have expected Germany to be second but they are eigth and India ranks second in inbound search traffic. The charts at the bottom seem like recent traffic only whereas the graph at the top is all-time. The also-visited shows popular social media blogger louisgray first, then techmeme, scobleizer, inquisitr and gigaom rounding out the top 5.

For comparison purposes, here’s Techcrunch’s chart:

With their pagerank 8, they have significantly more search traffic volume than CN. Here we see U.S. first, then Japan followed by India. I am guessing that Techcrunch Japan plays a role there. As for the also visited, it makes sense that crunchbase is first, many of the outbound links on TC point to their tech directory. It’s interesting that Friendfeed ranks fourth, I rarely see them speak about FriendFeed. Other top blogs readwriteweb, gigaom and venturebeat round out the top sites. They have data in the also searched for field which is dominated by youtube terms.

Again, if you are a social media consultant, an analyst, search engine optimizer, or work as an Internet marketer, you should be reviewing this data on your site(s), your competitors and your industry as a whole. I don’t see any feeds available but I am sure someone will hack that up soon. A widget of the data would be excellent as well.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under search, google, hitwise, Quick News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.