VijayWeb.com

Google has joined Alexa and Compete.com today by introducing a FREE service on Website trends (http://trends.google.com/websites) for competitive benchmarking studies. Find now thru Google, how your website is trending over a period of time and compare with your competition. Not only that, but also we can break-down the trends by region/country and correlate the data with search keywords and the visits to other websites by your website visitors.

Trends are important because trend is everything for the businesses to monitor on a regular basis. In the above screen shot, we would know that it is normal to have a spike on the year-end as it is a holiday season and rest of the months the trends are consistent.

Not only that, it is also important as the market sizes for your products/services are increasing or new markets are created for your products, you would need to know how well you are growing or declaining against your closest competition. In the below graph, facebook in India growing big while myspace is still consistent which may not be a positive indicator for myspace.com considering the businesses want to capture the international market too.

Google       Website Trends also provide top 10 search keywords that drove traffic from the search engines and again a comparative trend with the competition.

Though marketers know which keywords drove traffic to their websites, they may not know how much traffic was sent to the competition for the same keywords. In this example, 30% people searching for bestbuy have also landed at walmart.com

Google says the data is collected from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. Funny thing is Google itself opted out from this data so we can’t see how Google, Youtube, Orkut doing

Pls. note that we can get actual numbers to the graph by signing into Google.

Another Service from Google on the way for complete Market Research Data, luckily I got a beta login to try it out, here are the screen shots: http://www.google.com/adplanner

In addition to what is provided in Google Website Trends, here we also get Country Reach metric which I had also talked about a quicker solution to calculate country reach last year.  Ad Planner has ways to drill-down the sites by demographics.  This is a great tool to select sites to advertise on and even to know the demographics of our own site.

User Demographics and other metrics from Google Website Trends:

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