Thinking of buying advertising online? BEFORE you spend your hard-earned money, wouldn't it be great to know if the web site is really as popular as they say it is?

I buy a lot of online advertising and I test and track each ad I run to quickly tell if it gives me a good return on investment. To increase my chances of success I do some research before I buy the ads using a great free tool called Compete at www.compete.com.


Compete is a web site that tracks visiting patterns from over 2 million US Internet users. When you type a web site address into Compete, it provides a graph of the traffic the site has received over time. You can also enter multiple web sites and compare them against each other.

So if you were thinking of advertising on Free Traffic Bar, I Love Hits or Wolf Surfer, you can compare them like this.
http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/freetrafficbar.com+ilovehits.com+wolfsurfer.com_uv.png

As you can see, both Free Traffic Bar and I Love Hits get substantially more traffic each month then Wolf Surfer and are experiencing growth. In just a few seconds, you have much better information to base your decisions on.

The system is not perfect of course, but overall I find its results match my own tracking better than other sources like Alexa.