A client once gave me a challenge: “use as many free tools as possible and come up with a competition analysis and other data for my site.”

From that point onwards I have been a vociferous proponent of free tools to build businesses. In fact, I have made it my specialty to provide low cost internet marketing solutions to my clients. And no, the quality is not compromised as there are tons of free tools that help us not only get a clear picture of the scene but also a diverse opinion from different tools.

Alexa, Quantcast and Website Grader are 3 amazing tools that help us make some amazing inferences about the stats, audience, and other data of any popular website.

When you use these 3 tools together along with some news reports, you can derive some amazing inferences. More likely than not, most of the businesses have a competitor or industry leader whose website is very popular and can be used a benchmark.

To provide an example of how marketers and business builders can use these tools to make some informed decisions I have done a comparison of John McCain and Barack Obama’s websites.

Now I'm not about to try my hand at making "analyst" predictions as to who will win on Nov 4; whoever wins I wish them luck when they get down to business and start dealing with the financial mess.

Before we get into the findings, I’d like to make a disclaimer: McCain recently admitted to The New York Times that he does not go online or do emails. Basically, he almost admitted his technological illiteracy.

But his aides are smart; they are active on the web on McCain’s and seriously hope that his illiteracy does not become a hamper in the proceedings.

McCain’s aides have also realized that Obama’s Afro-American heritage and that fact that he’s a dynamic ‘newbie’ in the political arena compared to McCain has spiked the interest in voters and subsequently the traffic and rankings of his website.

So we have a near tech illiterate going head to head with a man who’s been raising some serious hell on the net with social media.

All right, coming back, first of all, the traffic and exposure comparison:

• Obama’s site had 7.9 million visitors in September 2008 and October seems going on the same trend. McCain’s site has 4.3 million in the same period.
• The reach for johnmccain.com has been under 0.1% of total global Internet users whereas barackobama.com has been above 0.1% consistently for past 3 months and even crosses 0.2% on one instance
• Alexa ranking for barackobama.com at the end of October 2008 is 794, which is quite an achievement to be featured in the top 1000 websites on the net. Johnmccain.com is 2,793
• Quantcast ranked barackobama.com at 116 at the end of October 2008 and johnmccain.com at 277
• McCain has had more video views than Barack Obama
• As elections loom close, increase in visitors to McCain’s website is much more than Barack Obama

I think the tremendous increase in traffic to McCain’s website is more likely to be a result of voters trying to weight their options just before elections. It is more likely that these people have already visited Barack Obama’s site much earlier due to the amazing internet marketing campaigns of Obama camp and are now trying to make an “informed decisions” by visiting the candidate they haven’t visited all these months.

Comparison of the audience

John McCain:

• More educated, more affluent, and slightly male slanted, skewing older following
• Regulars make up 28% of the total number of visitors
• Typical visitor also visits gop.com (anything new?)
• Majority visitors are Caucasian

Barack Obama:

• African American, fairly wealthy, skewing older, more educated
• Female support is more
• Has a substantial visitors from 18-34 age group as well
• The typical visitor reads democrats.org and visits steveharvey.com
• At 33%, has 5% more regulars than McCain

So you see how these 3 tools with some timely study reports have provided a clear understanding of the demographics of the visitors of both sites.

Of course, the above stats are just a case example of how the 3 tools can be used by the smart marketer to come up with some data to make informed decisions. For instance, if I were targeting African American wealthy older audience to place my ads I’d go for barackobama.com.

Contact Vishal Nayak to discuss your copywriting and marketing needs!