Compete Expands Service Offering; Ad Effectiveness And Top Site Lists

Compete has announced two new services to their current lineup; an ad effectiveness tool and a top site lists tool.

The ad effectiveness tool is named Ad Analyzer, Compete believes this is the industry’s first service to track online advertising performance beyond simple impressions and click-through metrics. From their product overview, "lets marketers measure the impact of ads on consumer behavior within target customer segments and across channels to maximize online advertising ROI. Marketers are shifting an increasing portion of their advertising budget online, and they need precise and detailed information about how their campaigns impact engagement, loyalty and online and offline retail sales."

I tried to login to the tool, but it doesn't appear to be live as of yet. Once I get a chance to play with the tool, I will provide a review. My first question is whether their "impact metrics" will go past the pageview and will provide more insight. If so, perhaps it could help publishers like myself sell more ads. We still need to move the buy-side away from the default pageview bundle buy.

The top sites tool lets you purchase a report of the top 15,000 web sites for $1,000 for any term(s) you desire. The reports are ready in 24 hours and can be ranked on any metric that Compete reports on. If Compete was smart, they would include an hour of expert analysis via phone when you purchase one of these reports. Then they could grow an analytics consulting practice as well build on top of the Compete platform. I will take 10% of first year profits for the idea :)

It's interesting to watch Compete continue to expand while Alexa just is stagnant. Alexa could have been something.