1.
“Secrets of Your
Competition”
Learn how your competitors are
driving results online
By Tony Guarnaccia
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2.
You Will Leave With…
• The 3 Questions You Need
to Answer
• Intelligence Process
(my best secrets)
• The tools and resources I use
• Best Practices
• Give you real life examples
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Why Competitive Intelligence?
• Forecast Competitor Moves
• Make Better Decisions
• Identify Opportunities
• Learn from Competitors
• Benchmark Your Business

4.
CI Answers Questions Like:
• How much traffic are you getting versus
your competitors?
• What is your competitor’s advertising
budget?
• Where are competitors gaining the
majority of their traffic from?
• What search terms are driving traffic to
your competitors’ sites and not yours?
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5.
The Solution
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6.
The Process
• Ecosystem / Industry
• Competitor Acquisition and Behavior
– Traffic Trends Key Metrics
– Visitor/Audience Profiles
– Traffic Sources Incoming and Outgoing Traffic
• Search and Keyword
• Display Advertising
• Social Strategy
– Content and Creative
– Onsite Behavior Key Metrics Analysis
• Site Analysis

7.
The Tools

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Industry > Google Trends

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Industry > Google Trends > Top

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Industry > Google Trends > Rising

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Industry > Google Keyword Planner

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Industry > Compete > Leaders

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Traffic Trends > Visits & Avg Time on Site
What to look for?
• Compare long-term performance - Trends
• Identify surprising peaks and dips - Look for why
• Create benchmarks - Identify changes in your marketing mix/strategy

14.
Visitor/Audience Type Profile
What to look for?
• Demographic & psychographic profiles - Interests and targeting
• Categories of content & topics covered – content strategy
• Websites visited - targeting, content and landing pages

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Traffic Sources
What to look for?
• Understand where they are coming from!
• Big picture inbound marketing recommendations - Referrals, Search, etc.
• Benchmark Sources – Understand gaps

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Incoming and Outgoing Traffic
What to look for?
• Incoming Traffic – display advertising, relationship-building, etc.
• Outgoing sources – more expensive, broken links, checkout, etc.
• Trends – Identify impact of changes

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Search Performance
What to look for?
• Overall Search Traffic trends – organics vs. paid
• Organic – new SEO strategy?
• Paid Search – budgets increasing or decreasing?

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Search Keyword Performance
What to look for?
• Who are your online competitors – many times different than offline
• Keyword Overlap – in what areas do you compete?
• Paid Search vs Organic – often different competitors

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Search Keyword Performance
What to look for?
• Set benchmarks – increase traffic by x %
• Create goals – rank more results in top 3, rank these precise keywords
• Make specific recommendations - SEO changes or new PPC budget

20.
Social Media
So, what do you do with this data?
• Learn what content appeals to your target audience
• Identify channels that are more effective for your competitors
• Determine best times to post

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Display Advertising
So, what do you do with this data?
• Quantify the implications of current display strategy
• Create a specific and targeted list of categories and domains to target
• Create content to match interests

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Marketing Content and Creative
So, what do you do with this data?
• Look beyond keyword lists! What ad targeting is working
• What is the ad content and what are the landing page strategies
• Determine how you can differentiate

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Onsite Behavior
So, what do you do with this data?
• Look for big deltas – positive or otherwise – in behavior.
• Visit your competitor's websites and identify reasons for the whys
• Make recommendations to improve user experience
• Create benchmarks to index your own performance.
• Look at behavior metrics a couple months after your key competitors have made big changes
Key Metrics
• Bounce Rate
• Time on Site
• Pageviews per Visit

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Site Analysis > Built With
What to look for?
• Technologies – Identify best practices
• Determine changes - Look for why
• Leverage best practices - See how you can incorporate into your strategy

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Site Analysis > Archive.org
April 2014
April 2015
What to look for?
• Identify trends - Determine how often designs change
• Determine changes - Look for why
• Create benchmarks - See how you can incorporate into your strategy

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Best Practices
• Always segment
• Look at trends
• Benchmark
• Filter
• Exclude Brand Keywords
• CREATE ACTION

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How is the Data Collected?
• Toolbars
• Panels
• ISP data
• Search engines
• Self reported
• Scraped/indexed
• Hybrid
• External Voice of the Consumer

28.
Need Help?
Get SEMRush and
Competitive Analysis at:
BigFishResults.com/NIM

29.
What If
You Knew the Secrets
of Your Competition?
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