Avoiding Traps with Competitive Analysis Best Practices for Online Businesses

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Knowing what and what not to do will certainly help a businessman achieve his goals quickly. Learn about competitive analysis best practices for website owners in this article. Check additional information about Competitive analysis best practices.

There are a lot of pieces of information that we have to handle when we are in the online business world. These include clickstream, surveys, outcomes, usability and many more. That in itself is already a tough job. However, there is a great source of information that we should really monitor because we can really benefit from it. This is known as the competitor analysis, which in many ways lets you to step away from your data warehouse and everything that is connected to your website. Optimizing the website through the competitive intelligence data will allow you to enhance the performance of your business as well as the overall web business landscape.

There are a number of competitive analysis best practices that you have to know about in order for you to fulfill such evaluation. But before that, there are two things that you should not jump into when you are seeing for a way to improve the performance of your online business. The first one is to use the conversion rate which is an instant tendency for almost everyone in the field. Senior managers often look at the conversion rate of their competition and compare it with their own. This is a complete waste of time because even similar companies have different strategies.

Another is the views obtained from content and pages. Although it is logical that you track the number of visitors viewing your pages, it is more effective if you take a look at the number of views obtained from the product detail page.

Now, the main question is, what should you do? What are the competitive analysis best practices? The most important competitive intelligence data are the acquisition, deep search evaluation and comparison, new market target identification and post site visit appraisal. Specifically the data will tell you the share of visits through the industry section. This is an integral part of the competitor analysis no matter what your products are. This will enable you to determine the share of traffic that you obtain and shows you the top companies that you are competing against.

Aside from that, another one from the competitive analysis best practices is to monitor the upstream and downstream traffic compared to your rivals. Using web analytics tools report, the referring URLs can give you useful information but typically half of the referrers are empty. Nevertheless, you will know the site/s where your visitors come from before they enter your own website. Apart from that, you can use the data to learn about which upstream sites your rivals are doing business with.

Search shares are also important which is why this is included in the list of competitive analysis best practices. According to the latest statistics, more than 80% of the traffic you obtain starts from a search engine. With this report, you can understand the percentage of traffic you get from the major search engines in comparison with your core competitors.

Lastly, you can monitor the share of category and brand key phrases. Begin by checking the brand key phrases since this is what most people use for keywords. Obtain a report for the top brand phrases will allow you to define the amount of traffic you share versus your competitors and even your affiliates and retailers.

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