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B2B Competive Analysis – Compete

We’ve been discussing tools to use to find out how your competitors are doing on their websites and how your customers and competitors seem to know so much about your website. Last week we covered one tool for getting information about other websites – Alexa. This week, we’ll take a look at another similar tool – Compete.

Compete is very similar to Alexa in that it uses a toolbar installed in the web browser to generate estimates and statistics about various websites. Similarities really end there, as Compete is a paid service, and provides much more information that just estimates about a site’s traffic. A trial account starts with 5 free credits and various reports cost different amounts of credits (the ones I tried seemed to either be 1 credit or 4 credit).

Site Analytics – This service is similar to Alexa (estimates using a toolbar) and allows you to compare up to 5 websites at once in terms of Visitors (People Counts – Monthly, Rank – Monthly, Visits – Monthly), Engagement (Attention – Daily, Attention – Monthly, Average Stay – Monthly, Pages/Visit – Monthly), and Growth (Velocity – Daily). Unfortunately, unless your website (or that of your competitor) has quite a bit of traffic, these are very rough estimates.

Search Analytics – This is the more useful of Compete’s services – Site Referrals, Keyword Destination, and Compare Sites.

  1. Site Referrals – lets you see what keywords are sending traffic to a website, as well as the site share, keyword engagement and keyword effectiveness for each. The top 50 keywords will cost 1 credit, and the rest of the report will cost more (mine was 4 credits for 243 keywords). This can be very useful both for optimizing your website and for adwords. Use this on your competitors websites to find keywords to use on your own site, or ones that are not in use for Google AdWords campaigns. If you run this report again other on the day you originally ran it, it will cost you additional credits.
  2. Keyword Destination – gives you the top sites that get a click from a particular keyword as well as information about the keyword share, site share, and average monthly search referrals. Use this tool to find who your competitors are on particular keywords, especially if you advertise using Google AdWords.
  3. Compare Sites – compare two websites in terms of keywords which are ranked with keyword volume advantage and engagement advantage. This tool would be useful after you’ve optimized your website to see how well your efforts stack up against your competitors (at least in terms of keyword searches).

Cost – You start with 5 free credits which you’ll use fairly quickly (just one or two reports). Reports seem to range from 1 credit for partial reports to 4 credits for full results. To purchase additional credits (bonuses included at higher amounts): $25 for 10, $45 for 45, $100 for 110, $500 for 560.

Summary – Compete is a good tool to use if you are heavily using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site and if keyword optimization is very important to you. If you do decide to use a Search Engine Optimization firm, spend a few bucks to use this tool before and after to see how well they did (remember you may need to wait a few months afterwards for the keyword traffic to actually increase). Best of all, you can play with some of the basics for free and pay going forward for when you actually need their keyword services.

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CrunchBase Information
Compete
Information provided by CrunchBase

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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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CrunchBase Information
Alexa
Information provided by CrunchBase

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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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