What tools can give reliable competitor traffic data?

[ontarget-media]

Could you give details of reliable tools that can measure and provide competitors' traffic data? Google Adplanner used to provide such information until June of last year, and while it's numbers didn't match Google Analytics data, the numbers were reasonably close.  The metrics we are most interested in are visits, page views and unique visitors.

We have looked at sites such as Compete -- but feel it is far too inaccurate/ skewed with US data only; also, would prefer to not rely on Alexa traffic stats.

Thanks in advance.

[Raydon]

obviously if you have enough experience with numbers, alexa figures (as inaccurate as they may be) can hint at a site's traffic (you need previous matched and ensured numbers to correlate your current numbers)

semrush sometimes nails it, other times it completely screws it up, but try that, it may help. They source a lot of their data from ads and scrapers and this enables them to give you surprisingly accurate results on some competitors for whom a good, long set of data exists...

I have seen some sites return 0 results in there as well. which tells you something about the tool and its sources if that site is up and the tool/site crawler is not blocked

even if these tools get better and better at analyzing certain signals and factors to "estimate" the data based on aggregate industry and historical data backdrops that they have, it will still be just that, a hardly accurate estimate. so watch out with all such tools.

ATM, you cannot know about a sites traffic unless you have analytics code setup, injected a hidden counter to spy on them (DONT- illegal and nearly impossible), or can somehow get access to their bandwidth and server data, you are out of luck for anything too reliable in means of traffic.

[ontarget-media]

Thanks, Moosa. Would you have a link to the post you mention above? I did a Google search and  couldn't find it.

May be, Moz can come up with such a tool if there's none really available!

[MoosaHemani]

I remember, Rand did a post about this a while back where he tested all the tools and display the results accordingly and guess what none of the tools was even nearer to the accurate traffic result.

I guess there is no tool in the market that can give you the results about competitors traffic!