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Sarah Worsham

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B2B Competitive Analysis – Alexa

You may have run across customers or competitors who claim to know your website traffic or how your site is doing compared to their own. How do they get this information? Typically it is from a service, such as Alexa or Compete (we’ll cover Compete next time).

Alexa has a traffic comparison service (along with a search and some other web information services). Some people have installed Alexa’s toolbar in their web browsers and Alexa uses information about their browsing habits to estimate traffic on websites. For each website, they have an overall traffic ranking, reach, and page views per user (all estimated). Each of these stats also has a 1 week average, 3 month average and 3 month percentage change. If your site has a high enough rank, you’ll be able to view these stats in graph form and compare them to other websites as well.

What is Alexa good for? Part of competitive analysis is knowing where your website stands compared to your competitors. Alexa can give you a general idea of where your website traffic is compared to your competitors as well as other industry-leading websites. Find an industry website that you consider to be well-designed with good content and use it as a standard to measure your own website improvements. Use Alexa to track how well your improvements and promotions are working compared to your industry-standard site and your competitors.

More importantly, in my opinion, is knowing about Alexa’s service and how it works in case your competitors are advertising their traffic compared to yours or your customers seem to know a lot about your traffic rankings. In both cases, be aware that Alexa does not factually report your traffic statistics, they are simply an estimation based on a small percentage of people. They may be useful for comparison purposes, but only if you take into account a margin of error for how many people in your industry use their service. The only way anyone can know your actual traffic statistics is if you share access to whatever tracking program you are using (or if they somehow have access to your web server log files).

Next we’ll take a look at Compete.

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Alexa
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B2B Competitive Analysis – An Overview

Even if you’ve never done a formal competitive analysis, you probably have at least taken a look at the competition by strolling past their booth at a trade show or picking up their brochures. How important is competitive analysis to your b2b website and what tools are available to get a view of the competitive landscape online?

Where to start? The best way to start is just to take a look at your competitor’s website. What types of content do they have on the site? Do they have a blog, a board, videos, podcasts, case studies, etc.? How often does it look like they update the site? Take a look at the design and layout of the site. Is it is pleasing to the eye? Is it easy to find everything?

Don’t know who your competitors are? A simple google search for keywords in your industry (that you would use to describe your own business) can give you a good list of competitors. Also, take a look at google local for geographically close competitors. Even if you do know your major competitors, taking a look at a couple of searches every few months can keep new ones from sneaking up on you.

Now what? Obviously you should look at your competitor’s products and services to know what they are offering. As far as their website design and content, these will give you an idea of the type of customer support they are giving. Websites with more content (useful content), that is updated frequently, are typically more customer-centric. Customers are more likely to visit their website to solve problems and keep up with what’s new. The more times a customer visits a website, the more likely they are to become repeat customers. In order to become the destination for information within your industry, you will need to invest some time and effort into useful information for your customers and potential customers.

Next we’ll take a look at a couple of tools to use in your competitive analysis.

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B2B Community Intelligence – GroupSwim

Bulletin boards, forums and wikis are a great place for your customers to get support and to form a community, but they are often difficult to use for finding information. Searches or tags that do not have any intelligence about what is truly important make it difficult to filter for relevant information. Your customers are often the most knowledgeable in certain aspects of your products and/or industry. It takes time and effort to create documentation to help and support your customers. Is there a way to tap into the expertise and effort of your customers to allow them to help themselves more effectively than you can?

GroupSwim’s unique product creates this intelligent community by tying together traditional board and forum functionality with semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise so that important information is easy to find. How does this all work?

  • Tagging – Tagging is a great way to get an overview about the subjects a post covers and is usually useful for searching. Typical boards and forums may allow tagging, but require people to add their own tags to posts, many of which do not. In GroupSwim, every post and comment (and any other content) in the system is automatically tagged using a semantic engine (you can also add your own tags) and your community can be pre-loaded with tags that are important to your industries or situation (including alternatives and synonyms).
  • Ranking – In busy communities, important posts are often missed or buried within a long list. Business readers do not have time to read an entire forum to search for answers. GroupSwim automatically brings important posts and content to the top to make them easy to find .
  • Expertise – In every community there are recognized experts in certain subjects. In traditional forums, these experts are found only through personal experience reading the forum. GroupSwim identifies experts by allowing readers to vote on posts and responses. These experts are identified for subjects and their responses and posts are ranked higher in searches and browsing. Customers can easily identify experts in each subject and build trust that they have the answers they need.
  • Search – Search is key to finding information buried in a forum, but GroupSwim combines semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise to give you intelligent answers. Searches include posts, tags, groups and member results all on one page. Search results can be ordered according to relevance, recent activity and popularity.

GroupSwim’s hosted application has member groups and privacy controls. Profiles are created automatically and contain all the activity for that person, including posts, tags, replied and ratings. Video, audio, documents, etc. can be posted and readers can create watchlists and subscribe to rss feeds to keep up-to-date on what’s going on. The addition of wiki-style pages is in the works for a future release.

Pricing is very transparent and is based on the number of users and file storage, with discounts for higher numbers of users. Starting at $150 minimum per month, this solution can be both affordable and scalable for even a small business.

If you just want a community for social networking, look elsewhere. But if you want to create an intelligent community to tap into expertise with little effort for a knowledge base, technical support site, or Intranet, add GroupSwim to your short list.

Update: I’ve created a B2B Knowledge Base & Discussion Board using GroupSwim. Please feel to check it out. I hope you consider joining if you’d like to have a discussion about the issues facing B2B Websites.

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GroupSwim
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