Ankit Nagarsheth on Traffic Trends

Here is a great post on Competitive intelligence using Google Trends for Websites…

Here’s the first one: Google Trends for Websites .

google trends for websites-webtrends

First thing you can see in the tool: Daily Unique Visitors. And if you are logged in then you see the actual number. And if you eyeball the graph you’ll see the trend, going down over time in the above case and rising like the phoenix in July!

Long time readers of this blog know that Daily Unique Visitors is not a metric I am too fond of, especially if you are using a web analytics tool on your website. If you want to use a daily metric as a KPI then use Daily Visits (sessions), not Daily Unique Visitors which is sub optimal for a number of reasons. For competitive intelligence it matters less, you are comparing apples to apple.

It is sad that most people leave the tool with the above graph, for themselves of their competitors. But there’s more. Here are two other things you can use.

Do this simple thing first, switch the geography setting to All Regions and here you go dear, here’s how your competitor is doing internationally:

google trends for websites-webtrends international

Looks like WebTrends gets half of its traffic internationally, and it contributes enough to actually reduce the slope of the curve (the one in the US is steeper, reflecting a worse situation in the US).

Since this will come up in many people’s mind, the Trends data for any site, and obviously not for www.webtrends.com (!), is Not from Google Analytics. The GA team has said in a recent post: “Google Analytics doesn’t share individual, site-level information with Google Trends for Websites or Google Ad Planner.” Read more context on the team’s official blog.

So you wonder, what’s the make up of the international markets? Here you go. . . .

google trends for websites-webtrends countries

The thing to do is correlate this with other pieces of data you have. For example I notice that India has actually become #2 referrer on my blog as well so it is interesting that WebTrends is seeing the same, well, trend. So it seems to be inline with expectations.

You might have other sources of data that you can correlate this with. For example you could look at that data just by the US and match it up with where your competitor has retail box stores, so maybe you can exploit a gap there.

And finally you get sites that Visitors who go to your competition visit, and top search terms they use. . . .

google trends for websites-webtrends-also visited