The chart above shows website traffic to each company’s main website. It doesn’t take into consideration tool sales, units sold, product specific websites (ie boschedge.com, boschdaredevil.com, etc) or any other outside factors. The graph simply measures web traffic reported from a 3^rd party source. In my mind this is a good measure of what is popular and the overall trend of how a company is doing. Overall I think it is pleasantly surprising that the lines weren’t all strait down. Watch the news or read the paper and all you hear is about how the sky is falling, the economy is in the tank and we are all going back to the dark ages but the year over year numbers are up for 3 out of 4 of the largest power tool companies. Again these are just web traffic numbers and not sales or profit numbers, but that’s still pretty positive I think. 

The obvious thing that jumps out is what’s going on with Dewalt? Historically it’s been arguably the most popular tool brand, with tons of very loyal customers however recently the talk in forums has been a little more on the sour side. Black & Decker now owns Dewalt as well as Porter Cable and the overall perception I have read from loyal users is that the quality has definitely come down. The die hard Porter Cable guys are possibly the most unhappy (unfortunately they don’t have their own website; it’s a shared site with Delta and other products so we can’t look at it in the chart). Years ago Porter Cable was considered one of the highest quality professional tool brands on the market, now they are comparable to Ryobi, better for a DIY occasional user.

The second thing that jumped out to me is that Bosch Tools is up 95% in web traffic from last year. That is awesome! There have been some exciting new products including a completely new 18V cordless line, new 12V Max tool and a wide array of new accessories but overall I don’t think this is what is driving the gains. The brand remains very strong, continues to make a high quality product, great innovations in their new products, good marketing and very few layoffs while other companies in general have seen cuts across the board.  

Milwaukee Tools also had some serious gains of 26% in web traffic from the previous 12 months. They had probably the biggest product launches with the new M18 lithium ion line and M12 lithium tool line. Both lines I would consider very successful launches.

Makita Tools also had modest gains but without a new complete line of tools to launches I think they did a good job in keeping traffic up with the new products they did have as well as strong promotions and relationships with MLS, Suzuki, Rockstar and sponsored events.     

Overall I think these numbers are pretty positive and sure lots of people are just window shopping but I think it’s a good look at the overall popularity of the brands and the trends. There are plenty of other tool brands to compare or you might want to see your site’s traffic compared to your competitors, I would strongly encourage anyone to do some comparisons of your own at www.compete.com.