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 analyse 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 organisation. Here is the report:

__________________

You have filled out our RISE questionaire 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:

	Your Results	Industry Avg	Overall Avg
Usability & Functionality	53.75%	50.00%	38.34%
Research	68.00%	30.22%	22.79%
Image	44.00%	36.44%	31.27%
Sales	87.14%	35.87%	26.24%
Efficiency	49.33%	38.52%	26.30%
Total	60.45%	38.21%	28.99%

Competitor comparison:

	Competitor 1	Competitor 2	Competitor 3
Usability & Functionality	46.25%	55.00%	57.50%
Research	4.00%	16.00%	34.00%
Image	18.00%	44.00%	32.00%
Sales	17.14%	2.86%	42.86%
Efficiency	26.67%	32.00%	37.33%
Total	22.41%	29.97%	40.74%

__________________

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 analysing 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.

Comments

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[OzAnalytics]

Thanks for the feedback and additional insight Sam.

I hope that bwired keeps on developing RISE as I think this sort of service will be very useful to Australian companies. As I said in the blog - no one else does this locally so all credit goes to you guys for standing out from the crowd. A more feature rich RISE will also be a great way to attract new clients to bwired.

Thanks,

Steve

[Sam Saltis]

# | by Sam Saltis on August 13 2009, 00:59
Hi Steve,

Thanks for your feedback on our RISE competitive analysis tool.

We offer this tool as a way for current and potential customers to make a preliminary assessment of their current website performance. Our strategy consultants generally use this tool as a first step. It’s not intended to be a stand-alone tool. It simply offers a means for comparison, and a guide for future direction.

We’re currently progressing the RISE model to provide tool tip examples and more detailed reporting including graphical representation of results to assist users with interpretation, and tailored suggestions for improvement based on percentages scored in each area under analysis. Fundamentally though, the results will still be based on information entered by the user and we’re still looking at the tool as part of our strategy development process.

Cheers,

Sam