This week, Gartner and Forrester are announcing financial results. The announcements should shed more light on their transition to peer-council and roles-based packaging, pricing, and structural alignments.

Each company is executing the transition differently. Forrester is moving faster and making sweeping, comprehensive changes. Gartner is transitioning more slowly, rolling out changes in more gradual steps, and creating an “evolutionary” experience for customers. They seem to be in a dead heat in transferring the concepts to their events businesses.

Against this backdrop, the mothership of peer-driven roles-based research and consulting — the Corporate Executive Board — today announced mixed results. CEB fell short of expectations for 4Q 2007 growth in contract value. The growth was just above 10%. However, other CEB news speaks to why its model is so attractive to Wall Street: more than 90% customer retention for the year, impressive expansion into new international and mid-sized enterprise markets, service introductions tracking rapidly emerging opportunities.

Some say Wall Street prodded Gartner and Forrester into embracing CEB’s peer councils and role-based research. That sounds reasonable, but that’s the past.

Today, the change is well underway. It’s high time we see if the CEB model can teach the old dogs some new tricks.

I’ve played a bit with the free Compete site analytics tool, motivated into action by another Compete service coming out of beta this week. Website analytics is one indicator of the popularity — and hence, influence — of industry analyst companies, based on their public-facing websites.

Compete caught my eye because it claims to “triangulate” user-generated content from its own army of cookie-carriers with info from service providers and other sources. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It addresses one of my concerns with Alexa — its limited approach to statistics-gathering.

I tried this simple query, comparing Forrester, Gartner and Corporate Executive Board. Compete shows Forrester far ahead of Gartner — in visits, people, engagement, etc. The gap is 2:1 or higher, on several of the metrics. Overall, Forrester has a 10,000-point lead on Gartner in ranking against the top 1 million websites. Compete hadn’t gathered enough data on CEB.

For comparison, here’s the same query on Alexa.

So, is Forrester.com really wiping the floor with Gartner.com? I’m not so sure.

We each need to draw our own conclusions about the accuracy of Compete, just as we did with Alexa and other user-generated metrics. What’s great is that we’re being given more and more choices in analytics, complete with well-designed features, speedy response times, easy exports — and the lowest possible price.