Taking a Competitive Snapshot

Compete.com is a web analytics startup that has some interesting features that are worth mentioning as they:

• claim to have a diverse sample of 2,000,000+ U.S. Internet users that have given them permission to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys
• have built an online competitive intelligence service that lets you compare websites in seconds.

Sounds interesting, but I thought that it would have no relevance to Australia as Compete say they only have U.S. users. But I thought I would give it a go, anyway.

On the left is the snapshot produced when comparing Commbank, NAB and ING Direct Australia (well, to be accurate: just the websites commbank.com.au, nab.com.au and ingdirect.com.au). Click on this picture to open a larger version.

Visitor numbers do seem to reflect the U.S. centricity of the sample, but I can see that the search terms and referral information could be useful for the marketing department to tune their site (SEO).

The only similar service that I know of that does cover Australia is bwired (a local web technology company). They don’t have an out-of-the-box solution but (if you can …

Compete.com is a web analytics startup that has some interesting features that are worth mentioning as they:

• claim to have a diverse sample of 2,000,000+ U.S.
  Internet users that have given them permission to analyze the web pages
  they visit and ask them questions via surveys
• have built an online competitive intelligence service that lets you compare websites in seconds.

Sounds interesting, but I thought that it would have no relevance to
Australia as Compete say they only have U.S. users. But I thought I
would give it a go, anyway.

On the left is the snapshot produced when comparing Commbank, NAB
and ING Direct Australia (well, to be accurate: just the websites commbank.com.au, nab.com.au and ingdirect.com.au). Click on this picture to open a larger version.

Visitor numbers do seem to reflect the U.S. centricity of the sample,
but I can see that the search terms and referral information could be
useful for the marketing department to tune their site (SEO).

The only similar service that I know of that does cover Australia is bwired (a
local web technology company). They don’t have an out-of-the-box
solution but (if you can find it) they offer an online website
comparison called RISE.

With RISE, you fill in a form telling RISE about how you think a
target website performs against 20 or so criteria. RISE then emails a
short report back to you comparing the target to both a composite group
of competitors and a set of 3 anonymous competitors.

Here is the report generated for ingdirect.com.au. The report is
based on my responses to the RISE questionnaire as a non-customer who
explored the website – NOT on any particular insiders information on
how ING Direct performs as an organization. Here is the report:

__________________

You have filled out our RISE questionnaire for www.ingdirect.com.au, and have select finance/banking for benchmarking. 

You have filled out our RISE questionaire for www.ingdirect.com.au, and have select finance/banking for benchmarking. 

Your results are below:

Competitor comparison:

__________________

So
you can see that bwired takes a very different approach to Compete.com.
For me, bwired is too open to the opinions of a single individual – in
this case me. Also, competitors are unnamed. Compete.com has the
advantage of larger sample sizes, time series data, named competitors,
and data on search terms, referral and destination sites. These
features, and the packaging and flexibility of the Compete dashboard
make it a clear winner. Shame about the limitation to U.S. users.

I make no mention of Google Analytics,
which is excellent for analyzing websites – but only for those you
‘own’. So you can’t benchmark against your competitors. Maybe I’m
wrong. I’d be happy to hear from anyone that knows more.

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