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I'm curious to know how most go about gathering information regarding their competitors? I am interested in developing an application that would directly compete with numerous websites and I am having trouble finding effective ways to evaluate my competitors.

I have used alexa.com, compete.com, statbrain.com, and Google Trends. All of them produce pretty similar results, which is basically just a little bit of traffic information.

So I'm just wondering if there are any other effective ways for me to evaluate my competition and have a more accurate idea of what I am up against. How do most start ups determine what they are competing with?

Thanks!

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Do you want to measure yourself against competitor's page views or do you want to learn about what would get you customers? What exactly are you trying to evaluate? – TimJ♦ Jun 5 '12 at 2:33
My position is that I know that I can develop a better product than what the others guys can. I guess what I am really interested in is understanding how much revenue they are generating, which I figured one of the best places to start would be website traffic. I need to know what the peak potential income could be so that I have a better idea of what sort of investment I should make to get my project off the ground. Does that make sense? – tbowman Jun 5 '12 at 13:18
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Traffic has no relationship to revenue. None. You need to find out what people will pay for your tangible product. – TimJ♦ Jun 5 '12 at 14:53
The product is free, the visitors will not pay anything for it. How you have come to this conclusion is beyond me. Traffic has everything to do with revenue on the web. Please explain your ridiculous claim. – tbowman Jun 5 '12 at 17:57
If you want to make money by advertising you can do that. I think there (far) are better ways. – TimJ♦ Jun 5 '12 at 18:16
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Use an SEO product like SEOomoz Pro which allows you to get more qualitative data on competitors like their rank, positions on keywords (you supply), social presence, etc. This will show you how much effort will be needed on marketing/SEO.

What are you trying to determine - size, revenue, profits, marketing budget, conversions?

You are saying you are interested in developing a product that has existing competition. Are you hoping to develop a better product, cheaper product or going after a niche market?

Sounds like you simply need a lot of leg work to learn your competitors products, understand their strategy, strength and weaknesses. I would suggest to use your competitors products or find people who do and see if you can identify opportunities to do better.

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It's a niche market that I plan on developing an application for that will be much, much better than the competitors. Like I stated in my comment above, I just need a better idea of what they are potentially earning from their traffic. The website provides a service that is free, so the majority of their income is just from advertising. I use their services a lot, so I am familiar with what they offer and how it all works, which is why I am so confident that my app will be much better. I'm just trying to do as much research as I absolutely can before even a dollar is spent. – tbowman Jun 5 '12 at 13:22
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I got another link for you - Compete.com for historical traffic data (allows you to identify any seasonal trends), example: siteanalytics.compete.com/onstartups.com in my experience the data isn't accurate (30-50% of actual traffic) but seasonality matters. – webbie Jul 23 '12 at 22:34

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