Why would it be useful to know when competitors are visiting your website?  Here are a couple of reasons:

• They may just be proactive, keeping aware of what their competitors are doing.
• They may be suffering lower levels of business and are trying to work out how their competitors are doing better.

When you know that competitors have been to your website, and what they looked at, it helps give you a better ‘feel’ for the market you’re working within.

Take us for example, there’s a company called Lead Forensics, who we don’t really consider to be competitors because we believe that we target different types of buyers (their analytics solution has many bells and whistles, but a much higher price tag to go with it, which puts it out of the financial reach of smaller businesses).

Lead Forensics is part of a group of businesses, one of which is Market Makers.   Here’s a brief view of recent visits from Market Makers to the A1WebStats website (newest at the top) …

That at-a-glance view shows us that people have been back to the site periodically.  We can dig deeper into any of those visits.  For example, this one from 10^th February …

That tells us that they searched on the company name, had been to the website 10 days previously, and on this particular visit they spent time looking at our live demo (plus of course all the other pages they looked at, and for how long on each page).

We don’t currently consider them to be competitors but who knows, in the future, that could become the case, which means it’s important to keep an eye on frequency of visits and what they’re looking at.

This principle applies to every business and A1WebStats makes it easy to spy on your competitors so that you’re always aware of their presence on your website, which probably makes you keep an even closer eye on what they’re doing.