Affiliate Marketing Blog: Interview With Jeremy Crane, Director of Seach and Online Media

I was intrigued by compete.com and what it could offer affiliates in the UK so I contacted Jeremy Crane who is their Director of Search and Online Media.

I've now had a great play with it and would highly recommend it for anyone that USA targeted PPC or SEO. But it looks like it'll get better with an API tool for you clever people out there.

As you can see by the tone of my questions I'm a convert already ... after reading Jeremy has to say, I'm sure you will be too!

So here goes:

1) What was the inspiration behind starting compete.com back in 2000? What problem did it hope to solve?

There were four main drivers behind our launch of compete.com; unmet market need, improved visibility for Compete, greater transparency into the data, and an effort to give something back to the community driving our data.

The core driver of our launch of compete.com a year ago was an unmet market need. There are millions of people running business on the web or at the very least highly dependent upon their website to drive their business. Up until the launch of compete.com there really was no reliable and consistent source of competitive web analytics for the average marketer. The existing companies in the space Netratings, ComScore, and Hitwise really were only servicing the top 1,000 or so companies in the space. As we all know the beauty of the web economy is that all those millions of players outside of the top 1,000 can have a voice. We felt those millions needed a better way to understand their web business.With regard to visibility we've been around as a company since 2001 and many of our clients considered us one of the best kept secrets in the industry. It's good to be best, but not so good to be a secret.

On the Transparency and giving back fronts there's been a lot discussion regarding the validity of some of the numbers that marketers are using to make very big spending decisions. Even small marketers have limited access to reliable data. We decided to open up the highest level of our data (domain) for free to both provide something back to the people giving us the data and to engage them in a conversation about our data. We encourage people using our data to give us feedback and help us improve our methodology. We think we offer the most robust solution available, but we also know we aren't flawless. Anything we can do to improve our estimates is embraced here at Compete.

There were four main drivers behind our launch of compete.com ; unmet market need, improved visibility for Compete, greater transparency into the data, and an effort to give something back to the community driving our data.

With regard to visibility we've been around as a company since 2001 and many of our clients considered us one of the best kept secrets in the industry. It's good to be best, but not so good to be a secret.

2) How is Compete's data gathered? The FAQ stats that the data is obtained from two million community members who have opted to share information - but how?

One of things that sets us apart from the rest of our peers in the space is the fact that our data comes from multiple sources. In fact we collect data on a monthly basis from more than 10 sources including ISP data, ASP data, Custom toolbars/desktop applications, and our own panel. Themultiple sources of data allows us to adjust for source bias that can exist with a single source of data, however, it also brings some complications along with it. It's quite difficult to integrate multiple data sources which is likely the reason no one else in the space has tried it. We only use sources of data that we feel confident are completely transparent to the consumer providing their data anonymously. Not only do each of these data sources provide different form of data but they also deliver the data to us in a variety of forms. Our own toolbar and application data is sent to in real-time as the users traverse the web. Every click is captured anonymously and recorded in our database with a time stamp and consistent ID tag. For our partner data this data is typically sent to us on a daily basis in a bulk file. Every click event in the data is cataloged in our data base again and saved with a timestamp and user ID. In addition to the click stream data we have demographic and usage data for every panelist. This allows us to normalize and project the data across the multiple sources so that it is representative of the US online population.

3) These two million users are based in the US - are there any plans to extend the monitoring across the national borders and allowing UK affiliates make use of the data?

Yes but probably not this year. There are a number of people at Compete considering our options and expanding to English speaking countries makes the most sense. The most difficult aspect of establishing data services in the UK or other countries is finding data sources that meet our strict requirements. Once the supply side is worked out, we know the demand is there because we have a lot of international users already."

4) Many affiliates may use Alexa occasionally to see how their competitors are doing. What advantages does Compete Site Analytics have over Alexa?

Alexa's single source of data is significantly biased.

Alexa data comes from a single source, the Alexa toolbar. Does your mother use the Alexa toolbar? I doubt it. “Regular” consumers don't use the Alexa toolbar. People like you and me (web marketers) use the toolbar. The result is that Alexa numbers end up being extremely biased towards technology focused sites. The best case example of this are the numbers that Alexa reports for compete.com. Alexa's traffic estimates for compete.com are absurdly high … on the order of double our actual traffic.

5) I've read about how the site traffic and internet rank is calculated (http://www.compete.com/help#snp3) and it seems very complicated. How long did it take to get to this stage of the methodology?

It is a very complicated process that has been tuned and refined over the years that Compete has been analyzing this type of data. In some sense it has taken us over 6 years to get to where we are today. The truth be told we aren't done yet though. Our data is under constant scrutiny by our data operations team. A lot of people significantly smarter than me are working every day to improve the methodology even further.

6) You partner with Coupon Mountain for the Deal Light promotional code tool - will this be launched in the UK?

Right now we don't have any concrete plans to establish any UK based services.

7) The usefulness of the data in the "Site Referrals" part of Search Analytics is unbelievable. If you compare the value for money and the probable large uptake of the tool, what impact do you think it will have on the search industry and bid costs?

We won't be satisfied with anything short of game changing. One of the original drivers of the success of PPC advertising in the search space was the ability of any marketer regardless of size to have a platform to advertise to their potential customers. Unfortunately, until now those same marketers really had no access to any competitive information to help them guide their search strategy … SEO and SEM for that matter. Our pay as you go pricing model allows both big marketers and small to take advantage of the absolute best competitive search data available in the US.

8) The Search Analytics functionality that Compete offers can be found within Hitwise. But considering that it can cost £10,000+ and is restricted to just one industry, making Compete's search analytics much more affordable for the smaller scale affiliate - how many paid users to anticipate attracting within the first year?

That's a tough one. Obviously our hope is that we'll have a lot … on the order of tens of thousands if not more. Our research indicates that only the really top tier marketers out there are able to take advantage of the existing resources such as Hitwise. Just as Overture and Google built PPC platforms for the masses, we think we've finally provided a robust solution for the masses on the competitive search analytics side.

9) What impact do you think it will have on Hitwise, do you think it will force them to lower their costs?

Perhaps in the long run Hitwise will be forced to reassess their pricing. Initially however, I think our target audiences are a little different. They are mainly focused at the top of the market while we're starting with a broad view. In reality we think our data is more robust than Hitwise, so I imagine we will start to have some impact on the top of the market as well. On the other hand we have heard form a number of top tier marketers that they don't necessarily intend to drop Hitwise in favor of Compete, but they do intend to start using Compete data alongside Hitwise data. The big guys tend to a favor a more data is better than less approach. When we rollout our enterprise solutions including API access, things may shift again a bit, but to start we think we're actually bringing new customers to the market as opposed to stealing existing competitor's customers.

10) I see Compete Search Analytics having an very beneficial impact on the industry as it should hopefully allow less marketing budget to be wasted on non-performing keywords. Was this a motivation for the service's development?

Yes … most of what we do at Compete, Search and otherwise, is focused on helping our clients and customers be more efficient with their spending.

11) Who would be the typical Compete Site Analytics and Search Analytics customer?

The initial response I always have to this question is “everyone with a website that they want to people to come to.” I'm really only half joking when I say this. Everything on compete.com is built around enabling marketers to understand their competitive environment more effectively. Whether they are small marketers with a niche business or multi-million dollar online behemoth there is value in the data at compete.com that can't be found anywhere else. Right now I think the typical Site Analytics customer is a little more broad than Search Analytics. This is partly due to the free aspect of Site Analytics and the newness of Search Analytics. Search Analytics customers with their focus on understanding specific aspects of search traffic are bound to be a bit more focused than Site Analytics users.

12) What's next for Compete? Are you going to launch more tools for search marketers?

Yes, what you see on the site right now is just the beginning. Over the next few months and year we'll be rolling out a number of enhancements and new analytics on both the Search Analytics side and elsewhere on compete.com. The first big changes and additions on the search side you're likely to see is a “Related Keyword tool” and some designation of Paid Search vs. Organic. Beyond search we are going to be adding Audience Analytics which will include demographic, behavioral and psychographic segmentation data relative to web traffic.

We have a lot of stuff brewing. No promises on exact timing right now, but rest assured our engineers are banging away on these upgrades right now.