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Thursday Nov 05, 2009

Measuring Online Competitors

How do you measure competition over the Web? You have no access to competitor analytics, so how can you determine his strength over your specific public? Let's take a look at a simple formula to evaluate your competitors presence.

There are many measures to evaluate strength of your online competitors: you can estimate their online presence through Alexa or Google page rank. You can also compare their prices (or price of a typical basket) to determine how much aggressive they are.

But, if you really want to evaluate competition presence over your actual prospect customers there is a better formula:

[Competitor Presence on Visitors] = [Visitors: that also visited competitor site] / [Visitors]

If, for example you got 8000 visits in your site and 5000 of those visits also visited your competitor site, your competitor presence on your visitors is 62.50%

You shall obviously select a list of key competitors (say 10) because there is no way to take out your visitor browser history. You can only determine he (she) already visited a specific site (by the way sometime criticized from a privacy point of view but … competition is war and … war is war!)

What really matters in this measure is not its current value, that depends on many factors, but how it evolutes along time. Tracking competitors presence let you spot not only who is growing but also whoever possibly decides to concentrate its efforts on your target market.

Technical note

You need to write some code to:

Determine if competitor's site was visited. It will run on visitor browser and you can start from code shown in this article.
Transmit that information to your analytics, this obviously depends on your environment and web analytics application.

Are you a management consultant?

Would like to try or coach this technique with your clients, do you need any additional or technical detail? Please let me know! Component Bases Solutions has great interest in partnership with business consultants. We can help you automate your proposed solutions in a very short time. We can also help to increase your visibility through links from many management tools we make freely available on the Web. Please contact for more detail.

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