Avinaush Kaushik outlines a few ways that Webmasters can use Google Trends for competitive analysis, starting with gauging how much of a competitor's traffic is home-grown versus international. For
example, a peek at the traffic for WebTrends (webtrends.com) shows a downward slope in terms of U.S. traffic year-over-year. But when the settings are shifted to All Regions, the downward trend has
lessened--reflecting a stronger market overall.
Further breakdown of the data shows that while the majority of WebTrends' traffic is U.S.-based, the site has seen a strong surge of
visitors from India. "The thing to do is correlate this with other pieces of data you have," Kaushik says. "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 can also take search terms data from Google Trends to see which keywords
your competitor's visitors are using. "This is getting to know a few different things, mostly around the 'persona' and 'preferences' of the kinds of Visitors who go to a site," he says. "The bigger
the site the most interesting this data is (especially when there are more keywords filled out in the Also Searched For part above)."
Read the whole story at Occam's Razor »