How do you monitor your competitor's online activity?

Web analytics only provide insights for your own site but what if you want to know what your competitors are doing. Comscore or Nielsen only helps for sites which attract large about of traffic, over 50k monthly visitors. So which tools do you use to gather insights on the traffic of your competitors?

At this point many of my clients are in the process of growing their online presence beyond just their websites and I am still working with them to get comfortable with the new channels they are in. But I would be interested to know more about the tools that would be used for this.

I have always used Alexa's free compare site feature on there front page. http://www.alexa.com you can put in three URLS including yours and compare against each other. It will show you all the analytics of your competitor and of your site and how they rank against each other on search engines.

I have always used Alexa's free compare site feature on there front page. http://www.alexa.com you can put in three URLS including yours and compare against each other. It will show you all the analytics of your competitor and of your site and how they rank against each other on search engines.

I was not aware of that functionality with Alexa. Thanks.

I was not aware of that functionality with Alexa. Thanks.

your very welcome :) sharing info on how to optimize our websites is one of the great things about DaniWeb.

I also use compete and SEMrush to have an idea of what my competitors are ranking for and what's their traffic level.

I don't really have a chief competitor for my main site. If I did I would at least have an idea of where to begin. It's frustrating.