Competitive analysis has enhanced significantly over the period of last 10 years. Activities that used to take weeks even months, can now be performed within hours. This is due to following modern day tools used by digital marketers and SEO experts Toronto alike.
- Similar Web
Similar Web is a data mining company, providing comprehensive information pertaining with website’s marketing strategy. The online web analytic tool uses different variables including:
- Bounce rate
- Monthly visitors (estimated)
- Average time spent on the website
- Page views per visitor on average
- Traffic influx percentage from different channels
- Percentage of traffic from social networks (comparing different networks)
- Top referring domains
- Images of banners for ad displays
- Keywords that account for organic traffic
- Keywords responsible for paid traffic
- Audience experience and interest
- Comparison with competitors’ websites
The service is free but the data you’ll get as a free member will be limited – as low as 5 results per metrics. For detailed analysis, following plans may be chosen:
- Basic Plan at $199 per month: it offers six months of data with 50 results against each web metric
- Advanced plan at $499 per month: 12 months of data with 500 results for web metrics. It also offers industry leaders profiles from more than 250 categories.
- Ultimate Plan at $799 per month: this plan offers 1,000 results per metric and 18 months data. Other features of advanced plan are also provided in this plan.
- Compete
Compete is an excellent source that can provide you and overview of what your competitors are doing. But this service is quite expensive compared to other tools. With free trials being restricted lately, you need to contact the company requesting for test service before purchasing a plan. The plan however, starts from $249 per month (introductory plan), going up to $649 a month (advanced plan). You can also request for custom plan.
Some impressive features of Compete.com include:
- In-depth analysis of visitors’ demographics
- Analysis of organic and inorganic (paid) keywords
- Conversion measurements
- Analytical reports identifying market share of various industry players
- SEMRush
SEMRush has been one of the most talked about analytics tools these days, primarily because you don’t have to allocate a large budget to monitor you website’s performance. SEMRush helps monitor competitor’s search marketing strategies and advertisement display.
Within seconds of entering URL, the tool gives you following information related to your website, or your competitor’s:
- Paid and organic traffic volume
- Keywords used for ranking
- Past data related to changes in search volume, up to two years old
- Nofollow and Dofollow backlinks
If you chose a free plan, you’ll receive five reports with 5 data points around each website metric. A pro membership costs around $70 per month, allowing you extensive data and accessibility with benefits:
- Generate up to 3000 reports per day
- Manage 5 different projects and as many as 500 keywords across them
- Receive up to 10,000 results for each report
Other plans include Guru and Business.
- Alexa
It’s been around for years and is perhaps the oldest tool available for website analysis. It can be used by brands with limited budgets. Although, it’s not as extensive as Similar Web, but it can offer:
- In-depth information related to regions where visitors come to your website,
- Keywords responsible for generating organic traffic,
- Top referring sites
If you opt for advanced plans, you’ll know about the keywords used by your competitors to drive paid traffic.
An advantage Alexa has over Similar Web is, it gives you an idea about site’s demographics. If users’ demographics on competitors’ sites are aligned with their target market, you can expect that they’re utilizing their marketing channels well enough.
- Quantcast
To understand the behavior pattern of your website audience, there is not better tool than Quantcast. To do that, you need to add a tracking code on your site allowing Quantcase to generate your data. Moreover, you can use this tool to access traffic reports on other websites.
The tool itself is not comprehensive, but you can use it in conjunction to other analytics tools to monitor changes and their impact on conversion rate and brand reputation. In this way, you can set benchmarks in the lights of competitor’s data.
Quantcast is also helpful because of its data mining capabilities. It offers:
- User retention metrics
- Traffic breakdown in terms of devices used
- Custom demographics – age, gender, income and other elements
Other benefit of Quantcast is its real-time tracking. It will help you emulate the elements on competitor’s website and monitor changes as soon as they occur. You can identify good or bad elements instantly and take necessary actions.
If you want to use this tool, better know about other compatible tools to make it a perfect solution for your website.
Conclusion
If you’ve just started to take interest in any of the above mentioned tool, start with a free plan and learn how you can understand, manage and respond to all those reports.