Hear that sucking noise? Don't let your Internet marketing get caught in a vacuum.
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I've written previously on the need to step outside the vacuum when doing web analytics, supplementing your data with qualitative information to help answer the more difficult questions about user experience. There's been a lot of discussion lately about leveraging available tools for understanding the competitive landscape when looking at web analytics. And this, at it's very core...is a good idea.It's pretty easy to pat yourself on the back when your online sales go up 5 percent for a quarter and your traffic increased by 7 percent. You can walk around the office trading high fives and proclaiming, "Hey guys, our new search engine marketing campaign and our site tweaks are getting it done! Check out the numbers!"I hear that sucking sound! Here, again, is where the vacuum is dangerous. Without some perspective of what's going on around the web, it's hard to say for certain if your efforts have truly been fruitful. Certainly, by employing qualitative methods (customer surveys and such) you can get to the root of why some customers ended up on your site and taking the actions they did, but it still lacks a greater perspective.What if the industry as a whole saw an increase in traffic of 25 percent for the last quarter, and an increase in sales of 10 percent. The jubilation around the water cooler would quickly make an about face and a new course would need to be charted. But how do we learn such info? Unless you want to embark on some illegal tactics of stealing some log files or bribing some competitors' employees (I would not recommend this), you are probably better off using some of the competitive research tools available. For a price, services like Hitwise and Comscore can provide pretty in depth information about competitor site traffic and sometimes even conversion. If you have a good handle on who your competitors are, you can research them specifically or even take a look at aggregate industry numbers to compare to your own.So it's as simple as that, right? Well, not exactly. One of the issues with those services is that due to the sample sizes they use in collecting data (particularly for Comscore), it's hard to get worthwhile data for sites that don't pull in millions of visitors each year. So for those middle market and small market players (especially if you don't have the additional money to shell out for these services), how do you get a feel for what's going on competitively? Well, aside from the paid services, there are some quality free (and partially free) services such as Spyfu, Quantcast, Compete, and Google Insights to name a few.While these won't provide you in-depth page information or clickstream data, you can get a general feel for how your market is operating. Depending on the size of your site and your market, I find Quantcast to be particularly valuable. Quantcast provides a fairly accurate depiction of site traffic for smaller and mid-sized sites, and can even give some useful demographic insights. If you know your competitors, this allows you to quickly cobble together general traffic trends and see if you are performing better or worse than your immediate market. If you don't know your market, Quantcast's ability to show you the affinity between your site and others will typically give you an idea of who visitors are comparing you to.I was working with a very niche client recently who took their products online for the first time. Historically, they operated in a very targeted B to B space, but by opening up their online store, were suddenly open to the world. One thing I quickly learned from analytics was that visitors who were purchasing were making multiple visits to the site, some times as many as four or five. Also, online purchases were much smaller than traditional orders. As I checked competitor sites on Quantcast (their site, being new, had not yet been indexed there) I noticed a remarkably high affinity for competitor sites among visitors.What happened, we would learn, is that we had entered a more competitive national market, and also opened ourselves to a savvy B to C market who liked to comparison shop! Quantcast data helped us identify competitors so we could see who we were likely being compared to so we could strategically position against them, and also compare general traffic trends. Further, for a fee, we were able to use tools like Compete and Spyfu to track the types of search requests hitting these sites (as well as their pay per click advertising) , helping us understand buyer intentions. Were people using searches more focused on buying, learning about products, or just general company information? This is all valuable data that can help in site optimization, search engine marketing and paid search management strategies.So if your Internet marketing sucks (with all apologies to Mark Stevens' wonderful book), it might be that you're stuck in a vacuum. I invite you to step outside.The author of this article is a managing partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, and web analytics company. Netvantage offers Internet marketing solutions to clients throughout the United States.
About the Author
Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, a Michigan Internet marketing firm that supplies clients with pay per click management, web analytics and search engine optimization solutions.
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