In the world of digital innovation, one of the most powerful ways to generate ideas and prioritize projects is doing a little competitive research and benchmarking. Here at Futurety, we’ve put together a few ways to compare ourselves and our clients to the competition, and see where everyone stacks up. Check out our four favorite tools below.
Tool #1: GA Benchmarking
Did you know Google Analytics offers a built-in benchmarking feature? It’s somewhat hidden and easily overlooked. Navigate to “Audience” then “Benchmarking” to view benchmarking data for sites in your specific industry and sub-industry, categorized by the number of monthly sessions.
This is a great way to see how your competitors are generating traffic and leads. Data is sorted by channel, and includes quality metrics like time on site and bounce rate per channel. Unfortunately, but with good reason, Google anonymizes the actual sites behind the data, but this is still a great way to see how your direct competitors are creating a demand for their products and services.
Tool #2: Facebook Comparison
Like Google, Facebook also offers a direct comparison tool, with the added benefit of allowing you to choose which specific competitors you want to benchmark against. To access it, go to your Facebook Business Page, click “Insights”, then scroll to the bottom under the “Pages to Watch” section.
As you would expect, there are limitations to how much data Facebook shares. You can’t go more than 30 days into the past, so if your competitor(s) just had a great or slow month, the comparison may not be accurate in the big picture. We often recommend setting up the comparison and checking back every few weeks to review data to control for short-term ups and downs.
Tool #3: LinkedIn Comparison
LinkedIn offers a similar competitor comparison tool to Facebook. Head to your LinkedIn Company Page, click “Analytics”, then “Followers”. At the bottom of the page, you’ll notice a list of pages that LinkedIn has identified that are similar to yours, based on common followers, content, geography, and other factors. From here, you can manually review each page’s content, or compare engagement rates to see who engages their followers most effectively. Even better, LinkedIn will often give you dozens of “similar” pages, potentially fueling your research efforts on other tools and channels and revealing competitors or peers you may not have previously considered.
Tool #4: SEMrush
The Futurety team are big fans of SEMrush, one of the leading SEO tools in the industry. Although the monthly service fee is $99, we feel it’s well worth the cost to gain valuable insights on your competitors that you can’t get anywhere else. Some of the ways we use SEMrush for benchmarking include:
- Organic competitor analysis: Seeing who often outranks us for our industry keywords
- Search advertising overview: Plug in your competitors’ domain, and see what keywords they spend on for paid search, and how much they spend each month
- Display advertising overview: See the actual display ads your competitors are running, and how long they’ve been running them. See the photo below for what Salesforce has been running lately.
- Traffic analysis: Similar to Google’s Benchmarking report, with added data going back several years.