You might have a handle on how users get to your website, but how do you find out where visitors spent time online when they are not buying your products or reading your information? Perform some high-end competitor research with Google Trends for Websites, of course! While the data is not 100% accurate (what data is?), it provides valuable insights which are immensely valuable for advertising, promotions and Web marketing in general.

The Google Trends for Websites tool shows the number of daily unique visitors to a specific site over a specific period of time. While it only offers insights into broad search patterns, the service also analyzes what regions visitors came from, helps you discover related sites those consumers visited as well as the search terms those visitors have in common with each other.

While it won't work for sites with low traffic volumes, it's an exceptional starting point for competitive research. When you discover what sites are "tops" in your overall business category, you can make an informed assessment for online advertising buys or perhaps even how to best spend your time recruiting affiliates or partners for your website.

Let's look at how Facebook appears in Google Trends for Websites and how can leverage the information. We can see that Facebook is most popular in the US (and if you drill down that the most popular region is California) but how about the UK, the second largest market for Facebook? Using Google Trends for Websites we can see which subregions use Facebook the most and even sites such as cineworld.co.uk or isingles.co.uk. These sites might make for an excellent place to network or even make a media buy on.

Let's also look at how Amazon appears in Google Trends for websites. Again, Amazon is most popular in the US. But we know for certain that there are many competitors. In this instance, we can see that Amazon users also visit alibris.com, barnesandnobles.com, overstock.com and other. We discover also that it's not just bookstores that these users visit. It's also epinions.com and nextag.com, a review site and a comparison shopping site respectively. If you're an author trying to sell your book Amazon, you might learn that it is essential to be active on these two locations, drumming up support for your latest tome or leveraging comparison shopping engines within your own promotions.