Part of my job at Trone is to continue to evaluate our online toolset to see what is out there that can be used to better serve our clients.  Compete.com has an extensive list of tools available to report on site metrics.  What’s the cool part?  They will allow you to report on site metrics for sites other than your own.  They do this by compiling data based on web browser toolbars (yes, those usually report usage back to someone), receiving statistics from internet service providers and other proprietary dark magic.  Recently, I went on a quest to entertain myself trying to find correlations between certain domains based on my perception of their success in this economy, times of year for spikes, etc.  Here are some fun/interesting results:

Obviously, there are annual events that spike certain site usage during the same time each year:

In light of Obama being sworn in today, this is interesting (nevermind that the October stats for unique visitors are within a half of a percentage point of the electoral vote):

Hummer’s site traffic suffered in close inverse proportion to the increase in site traffic to sites that help consumers find cheap gas.  I believe the spike in April was a response to some Feb/March ads before the gas prices started really increasing.

Also interesting this year are the graphs for visitors to popular job hunting sites:

The social networks are battling it out:

My favorite one shows people obviously play hard ramping up to the holidays, work hard in the new year and then get spring fever.

What can we truly deduce from these?  Nothing for certain with just this information in a vacuum, but our strategy and research guys can do stuff that makes my head spin.  I’m sure they have their own interesting (and almost certainly more accurate) views on the simple data I’ve played with.