16. What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors
by Sean Power, Alistair Croll
Complete Web Monitoring
- Complete Web Monitoring
- Transactional Sites
- Collaboration Sites
- Software-as-a-Service Applications
- 3. What Could We Watch?
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming From?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Visitors?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- The Tools at Our Disposal
- 4. The Four Big Questions
- II. Web Analytics, Usability, and the Voice of the Customer
- 5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
- Dealing with Popularity and Distance
- The Core of Web Visibility
- A Quick History of Analytics
- The Three Stages of Analytics
- Implementing Web Analytics
- Sharing Analytics Data
- Choosing an Analytics Platform
- The Up-Front Work
- Web Analytics Maturity Model
- 6. How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability
- Web Design Is a Hypothesis
- Seeing the Content: Scrolling Behavior
- Proper Interactions: Click Heatmaps
- Data Input and Abandonment: Form Analysis
- Individual Visits: Replay
- Stalking Efficiently: What You Replay Depends on the Problem You’re Solving
- Post-launch usability testing: Are my designs working?
- Conversion optimization: why aren’t conversions as good as they should be?
- Helpdesk support: Why is this visitor having issues?
- Incident diagnosis: Why is this problem happening?
- Test case creation: What steps are needed to test the app?
- Dispute resolution: How do I prove it’s not my fault?
- Retroactive Segmentation: Answering “What If?”
- Stalking Efficiently: What You Replay Depends on the Problem You’re Solving
- Implementing WIA
- 5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
- Web Interaction Analytics Maturity Model
- 7. Why Did They Do It?: Voice of the Customer
- The Travel Industry’s Dilemma
- They Aren’t Doing What You Think They Are
- What VOC Is
- What VOC Isn’t
- Four Ways to Understand Users
- Kicking Off a VOC Program
- Planning the Study
- The Kinds of Questions to Ask
- Designing the Study’s Navigation
- Why Surveys Fail
- Don’t ask for frequency of visits
- Don’t ask about subscription rates
- Don’t ask what they just did
- Don’t use VOC to determine web performance
- Don’t ask about loyalty
- Don’t ask for demographic data that you can get from other sources
- Don’t ask questions they can’t answer
- Don’t ask too many questions
- Don’t ask a question that won’t reveal anything
- Always give visitors an out
- Discourage lingering
- Provide room for subjective feedback when no answer applies
- Integrating VOC into Your Website
- Trying the Study
- Choosing Respondents
- Deciding Who to Ask
- Encouraging Participation
- Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
- III. Web Performance and End User Experience
- 8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
- What’s User Experience? What’s Not?
- The Anatomy of a Web Session
- Wrinkles: Why It’s Not Always That Easy
- DNS Latency
- Multiple Possible Sources
- Slow Networks
- Fiddling with Things: The Load Balancer
- Server Issues
- Server OS: Handling networking functions
- Web service: Presentation layer, file retrieval
- Dynamic tier: Application logic
- Storage tier: Data, state persistence
- Third-party components: Web services, transaction processing
- Permissions and authentication
- The relationship between workload and performance
- The end result: Wide ranges of server responsiveness
- Client Issues
- Other Factors
- Measuring by Hand: Developer Tools
- Places and Tasks in User Experience
- Conclusions
- 9. Could They Do It?: Synthetic Monitoring
- Monitoring Inside the Network
- Monitoring from Outside the Network
- Different Tests for Different Tiers
- Beyond a Simple GET: Compound Testing
- Configuring Synthetic Tests
- Aggregation and Visualization
- Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
- Synthetic Monitoring Maturity Model
- 10. Could They Do It?: Real User Monitoring
- RUM and Synthetic Testing Side by Side
- How We Use RUM
- Capturing End User Experience
- Deciding How to Collect RUM Data
- RUM Reporting: Individual and Aggregate Views
- RUM Concerns and Trends
- Real User Monitoring Maturity Model
- 8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
- IV. Online Communities, Internal Communities, and Competitors
- 12. Why Care About Communities?
- 13. The Anatomy of a Conversation
- The Participants: Who’s Talking?
- The Topics: What Are They Talking About?
- The Places: Where Are They Talking?
- 14. Tracking and Responding
- Searching a Community
- Joining a Community
- Moderating a Community
- Running a Community
- Putting It All Together
- Measuring Communities and Outcomes
- Reporting the Data
- Responding to the Community
- Community Listening Platforms
- Community Monitoring Maturity Model
- 15. Internally Focused Communities
- 16. What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors
- Watching Competitors’ Sites
- Do I Have Competitors I Don’t Know About?
- Are They Getting More Traffic?
- Do They Have a Better Reputation?
- Are Their Sites Healthier Than Mine?
- Is Their Marketing and Branding Working Better?
- Are Their Sites Easier to Use or Better Designed?
- Have They Made Changes I Can Use?
- Preparing a Competitive Report
- Competitive Monitoring Maturity Model
- V. Putting It All Together
- 17. Putting It All Together
- 18. What’s Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring
- A. KPIs for the Four Types of Site
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Media Sites
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Media Sites
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Collaborative Sites
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to SaaS Sites
- How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
- Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
- What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
- How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
- How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
- How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
- Where Are My Risks?
- What Are People Saying About Me?
- How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
- Index
- Colophon
This book is about getting a complete picture of every website that affects your business. You will know the most about websites and communities you run, and you can learn a significant amount by moderating and joining communities. You can also gain important insights into your competitors through many of the techniques we’ve seen so far.
You can use community search approaches to eavesdrop on your competitors and see what people think of them.
You can use synthetic testing to compare your competitors’ performance and uptime to your own.
You can use search and ranking tools to understand how well your competitors are viewed by the rest of the Web.
Some usability tools may even let you analyze how test users interact with competitors’ websites, helping you to improve your own.
Before you embark on any competitive analysis, you need to consider whether you care if your competitors know what you’re up to. If you perform competitive research from your own domain, their analytics will show your visits. What’s more, they may have specific terms of service on their websites that prohibit things like synthetic testing or crawling by others.
Let’s look at how you can keep an eye on your competitors.
Note
If you haven’t already done so, review Chapter 14. All of the approaches we describe there apply equally well to competitors.
How Much Should You Worry About Competitors?
Guy Kawasaki is a vocal proponent of smart, information-driven startups. In his most recent book, Reality Check (Portfolio Hardcover), he talks about how companies can build and market great products. We asked him for his thoughts about getting too caught up in competitive analysis, particularly for startups.
Complete Web Monitoring: How has the availability of free online competitive analysis changed the product planning process?
Guy Kawasaki: My guess is that the product planning process is not too affected by the wealth of competitive information that’s available. The basics are obvious: you need to know what your competition’s product does, how much it costs, when it will be available, and what people are saying about it.
But the truth is that there is so much to do that’s internal and, ironically, out of real control, that I would bet that a product manager would like to know what his engineers are doing more than what the competition is.
CWM: How much time and energy should a startup devote to this process versus other things, and when should they do so?
Guy: It’s hard to quantify, but my response is “not much.” A startup should just create a great product that it loves and let the chips fall where they may. It should not assume a world of perfect information where the whole marketplace understands exactly what you or the competition is doing.
The greatest competition startups face is ignorance—that is, people don’t know why they should use a product at all as opposed to why they should use products that do the same thing from company A or company B.
CWM: How does a company know when it’s too obsessed with competitive monitoring and not focused enough on making a product or service that rocks?
Guy: Generally, a company should be obsessed with creating a great product or service. It should never be obsessed with the competition. If a young company has anyone with a title like “competitive analyst,” then it’s gone too far. Max, competitive analysis should take up about 5% of a company’s mindshare.
The wonderful thing about the Internet is that everyone’s online. Your competitors have gone to great lengths to tell you all about themselves, putting product specifications, lists of senior employees, and in some cases, pricing and technical specifications within your reach.
Web crawlers index these sites. Search engines analyze inbound and outbound links to them. They’re ranked for popularity and monitored by testing services. Thousands of people search for them, using all kinds of terms. All of this information is collected and stored, and much of it is free for the taking. For more detailed analysis, there are paid services that rank popularity and estimate traffic levels.
Before you start gathering information on your competitors, however, ask yourself why you care. Only then can you decide what to collect and how to report it. Some possible questions you want to answer include:
Do I have competitors I don’t know about?
Are others getting more traffic than me?
Do competitors have a better reputation than I do?
Is a competitor’s site healthier than mine?
Are others’ marketing and brand awareness efforts more successful than mine?
Is a competitor’s site easier to use or better designed?
Have competitors made changes that I can use to my advantage, such as changes in products, funding, or staffing?
All of these questions, and more, can be answered easily. To report competitive data on others, you’ll need to have comparable data on yourself. For example, if you want to know whether competitors’ sites load faster, you need historical measurements of your own website’s performance.
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