Competitor Research in Global Markets

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Competitive website analysis can be tricky for global markets.  Take the stats for Baidu.com, the leading search engine in China, from Quantcast which is logically not representative of global traffic (including China) to the site; only an estimated 848K per month (compare that to US Google traffic of 146M).  Of course those are hits mostly Chinese expatriots and non-resident visitors.

The magic of quantcast.com, compete.com estimates [1] is simply getting scrubbed datasets from some ISPs.  Therefore they can be drastically inaccurate due to natural anomalies such as a large majority of traffic falling outside of available data samples.

Quantcast only provides statistics for US markets; I wish I had a market research consultant sitting next to me now to suggest similar competitor research tools.

There are a host of these sites (basically great marketing planning software with many features free from the bat) which are incredibly great for domestic companies researching other sites with a strong presence in the US markets.

I don't see many with sites which offer estimation of non-US markets.  I'll try completing a survey for my own purposes to hone in on options for researching some Asian, European and South American regions.  Anybody know of other companies such as Quantcast offering statistics on non-US traffic?

[1] Quantcast and other similar companies do provide direct measurement to webmasters via javascript tracking codes.

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