Can I find out my competitor's traffic?

Q. Our minister told me that I can find out how much traffic my competitors get. Do you know how to do this?

A. It's impossible to find out how much traffic your competitors get unless they somehow have their log file statistics out in the open. Sites such as Alexa.com can give you some comparative data, but they will never give you the exact amount of traffic that your competitors receive. The only sites you can get that info from are those to which you have log file access, or those on which you have installed some tracking code. Nobody can just install this sort of thing on their competitors' sites, as they'd need server access to do so.

Added note: After this question was answered in the newsletter, I received several replies letting me know of some tools that could in fact provide you with some competitive analysis. Joe Morin from Boost Search Marketing, wrote the following: "I would say that there are several tools that can give you that exact data such as Comscore data that takes a toolbar sampling of certain demographics (by their assigned user base) and then applies their own popularity algorithm to determine traffic figures to a pretty accurate assumption even tracking where traffic comes from (sites) and where they go to afterwards, something that no analytics programs have been able to ascertain. Also Hitwise analyzes traffic from all of the major ISP’s gathering traffic data at the server level so I can examine competitor traffic and even see what keywords they are deriving their traffic from and from what search engines."