RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

Six free tools for world-class competitive intelligence

Posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 12:05 PM by Jebadiah Roberts  |  Comments (0)

If you’re already mining your website’s analytics for actionable insights, you might think you have all the data you need—or at least all you can handle. But the truth is, your site’s data is just the beginning, and your analytics efforts will never be complete without competitive intelligence analysis.

Adding extra data might seem daunting, but competitive intelligence analysis can be both cheap and easy if you use the right tools, and it’s an essential part of your online marketing strategy in an increasingly sophisticated digital marketplace.

What is competitive intelligence analysis?

In its simplest sense, competitive intelligence analysis is treating the web analytics data of your competition like it’s your own. And though it may be hard to imagine, much of the analytics data you use to optimize your own online efforts, from basic visitor counts to advanced engagement metrics, is available for your closest competitors, and most of it is completely free.

Why is it necessary?

Regardless of which analytics tool you use, traditional web analytics will always be a “silo,” meaning it exists in isolation. You might feel good about your online performance, and you might even see a steady increase every month. But until you understand how well your competitors are performing, as well as how they’re doing it and—most importantly—how it’s affecting you, you’ll never have a true sense of your online success and how it can be improved.

Where does the data come from?

Competitive intelligence data can come from any number of sources, including ISP providers (who maintain detailed records of every user’s online habits), opt-in panels (through which users agree to be monitored), toolbars (which keep tabs on unsuspecting searchers) and self-reported data (usually from sites that want their stats available to potential advertisers).

But no matter where your data comes from you should always be aware of two truths:

1. Every data source has sample biases. There’s no getting around them—all you can do is anticipate them and compare sources for the best picture possible.
2. No competitive intelligence data will ever be 100% accurate. And it doesn’t need to be. Your goal isn’t to pinpoint precise metrics—it’s simply to get a sense of how you hold up to the competition and what you can learn from their tactics.

Is a free tool enough?

If you’re working with a generous budget, you can’t go wrong with a paid tool like Hitwise or comScore, both of which offer incredibly deep competitive analytics insights. But for this post, we’ll look at mining some enterprise-level competitive intelligence using the following free tools, so you can focus your time and effort on analysis.

Alexa

Owned by Amazon, Alexa was one of the first big players in competitive intelligence. It collects data by encouraging users to download its toolbar and then capturing their data as they surf. Alexa is most famous for providing traffic-based website rankings, which were once an important consideration for advertisers deciding where to spend their budget. Think of Alexa as a popularity contest for websites.

Above is a simple example of what Alexa’s best known for. Search for stats on the Toronto Star website, and you’ll see that in terms of traffic, thestar.com generally ranks somewhere above 2,500.

That number is meaningless, of course, without context, so a ranking’s only real value lies in comparison. Throw the sites of The Globe and Mail (a competing Canadian newspaper at the national level) and the populist Toronto Sun into the mix, and you get a quick visual comparison of traffic to all three sites over the past three months.

When compared to The Globe and Mail, the Star’s site ranking suddenly doesn’t look so hot. And it would appear that no one in the digital department at either paper needs to worry about the Sun in the near future.

Alexa has taken steps to go beyond simple site rankings, and you can now access deeper insights, like a site’s percentage of search traffic, high-impact search queries, upstream and downstream visits, and even demographic information about visitors.

But as with any competitive intelligence tool—particularly the free ones—you have to consider the data’s source. And because Alexa’s data comes only from users who agree to download its toolbar, its measurements can be extremely skewed. The data also tends to be biased in favor of Windows and Internet Explorer users.

Overall, Alexa is a decent first step in comparing your site’s traffic to that of your competitors. But don’t expect any level precision, and don’t rely on it for deep analytics insights. The free tools discussed below will better serve those needs.

Compete

Whereas Alexa might be considered a dated tool with a suspect source of data, Compete is a hot up-and-comer with a lot to offer. It’s basically Alexa on steroids. And though its free version pales in comparison to the depth of insights its paid platform offers, its “hybrid” data, which comes from a wide range of both ISP providers and opt-in panels, is far more reliable.

Here’s a quick comparison of monthly visits between the Star, Globe and Mail, and Sun—this time using Compete’s free version.

The data doesn’t look too far off from Alexa’s website rankings, but switch to unique visitors, and you get a slightly different view of the Sun’s viability as an online competitor.

Compete also offers an overall rank metric, as well as deeper metrics, including page views, average stay, visits per person, pages per visit, attention and daily reach, which are available through its paid version.

So what’s the downside? Though it’s more accurate than Alexa and other sources, Compete’s free version is still extremely basic, and its measurements are always at least a month old. You also can’t dial down any deeper than three-month increments. And though the hybrid data allows for greater accuracy, it also means you never know exactly where the data is coming from, so you can’t anticipate and account for the sample biases that come with a particular source.

Google Trends for Websites

Though Google is a notorious data hoarder through its own widely used search and analytics platforms, it also collects third-party market research data and consumer opt-in panel data and makes much of it available through some incredibly powerful free tools, one of which is Google Trends for Websites.

Google Trends for Websites is an alternative to Compete that compares to Compete’s free version but still lacks the depth of insight of its paid version. Like Compete, Trends for Websites lets you compare your traffic to that of your competition, as shown below.

Even better, you can compare traffic trends across custom date ranges, including the last 30 days, and you can drill down to specific geographic regions to see who takes the cake in different areas.

But one of the biggest advantages of using Google Trends for Websites is the “Also visited” data, which lets you see which other sites your visitors are checking out, giving you a clear picture of who your true online competition is. Below, we can see that while the Star and Globe are often thought to be direct competitors in print, the Sun is actually a more proximate competitor in terms of online visitor behavior.

And the “Also searched for” data shows that, while some Star readers are also searching for “globe mail,” even more are searching for “toronto sun,” meaning the Sun is a bigger competitor in terms of brand-name search.

Google DoubleClick Ad Planner

Another powerful free tool from Google, DoubleClick Ad Planner aims to help online advertisers decide where their budget would best be spent. It offers basic traffic and daily unique visitor metrics similar to those found in Google Trends for Websites, but the real meat lies in its demographic and psychographic visitor data. Unfortunately, demographic data is currently available only in the States and the UK, but the graphs below show gender, education, age and income levels for US readers of the Star.

Psychographic data is available in Canada, however, and the following comparison shows the main interests of visitors to each site.

So if you were an advertiser looking to reach sports fans, the Sun might be a better bet. But if you were an online editor at the Star looking to steal Globe readers, you might think about increasing your business coverage. And, similarly, a digital marketer at the Star might run search campaigns aimed at upping the exposure of existing business coverage.

Google Insights for Search

So far, we’ve looked at competitive data for specific sites, but you should also go beyond measuring your competitors’ actual sites to get a sense of the larger search ecosystem. And the perfect competitive intelligence tool for this purpose is Google Insights for Search.

Above we see that, within Ontario, searches for the Star far exceed those for its competitors, and the Sun has outranked the globe in terms of brand-name searches for almost the entire past year.

When you dial down to “Regional interest,” however, you can see that the Globe has a tighter grip on Toronto than the Sun. And if the Star wants to increase its online readership throughout Ontario, it might do well to start with regionally targeted search-marketing campaigns for Barrie, Guelph, Burlington and St. Catharines, where the Globe is dominating the search market.

Another cool feature you’ll find in Insights for Search is the “Rising searches” data, which warns of up-and-coming competitors that your visitors are increasingly searching for. Based on the image above, it should be clear to anyone at the Star that they’re now competing not only in the print-to-online category but also with news outlets from other traditional media, as their visitors are also searching for online news from CNN and CBC.

Microsoft adCenter Labs

Not to be completely left in Google’s dust, Microsoft also offers some interesting competitive intelligence tools through its adCenter Labs. Perhaps the most useful tool, “Search Funnels,” lets you perform a basic search-funnel analysis on keywords related to your brand. Initially intended to be used as a keyword discovery tool (a purpose for which it’s still well suited), it also lets you learn what brands users search for before and after searching for your brand-related keywords.

Below we see that, according to Microsoft’s data, 13.52% of people who search for “torontosun” later query “torontostar” (as part of the clunky user experience, the two-word “toronto star” didn’t register), while only 5.72% of people who search for “globeandmail” do the same.

Similarly, we can see below that 15.16% of users who search for “torontostar” go on to search for “torontosun,” while “6.76% later search for “globeandmail.”

Since both the Star and Sun are Toronto-specific newspapers, the fact that they’re sharing searchers isn’t unexpected. But should the outgoing searches related to the Globe, National Post and CNN increase, the Star might consider ramping up its national and international coverage online in order to retain visitors.

The final analysis

If paid competitive intelligence tools aren’t in your budget, the free tools described above will put you on the path to some incredibly deep competitive analytics insights. But before you start spying, keep these five essential rules of competitive intelligence in mind:

• Go beyond rank: Tools like Alexa were once groundbreaking, but they’re now just a starting point. Don’t rest your site’s success on rank alone, and never consider rank in isolation. Its only use comes with comparison.
• Step outside of your silo: Monitoring your site’s web analytics isn’t even close to enough. The actions of your online competitors will always have drastic effects on your performance, and the only way to understand those effects is to analyze your competitors and respond accordingly.
• Beware of sample biases: Whether your competitive analytics tool uses data from ISP providers (Hitwise), opt-in panels (comScore) or toolbars (Alexa), there will always be a sample bias associated with the source. But by anticipating that bias, and by understanding that completely accurate competitive intelligence will never be possible, you’ll still get a useful picture of what’s working for your competitors and how it’s affecting you. You should also keep in mind that even hybrid data (Compete, Google and Microsoft tools) is flawed in that its inherent biases can’t be isolated.
• Surveil the search ecosystem: Tools like Google’s Trends for Websites and Insights for Search and Microsoft’s adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast and Search Funnels are valuable for so much more than keyword discovery. Use them to understand what your visitors are searching for and what other sites they’re visiting. If you’re like most businesses, you’ll be surprised to learn who your true competitors are on the web.

That’s it. You now have the tools and knowledge to start spying on your competitors with no investment beyond your own time and energy. And if you decide to purchase a paid tool in the future, your experience with free tools will help you understand exactly what metrics—and which data sources—offer the greatest return on investment.

Tags: competitive intelligence, web analytics