Gathering more data for your competitive intelligence (CI) will allow you to have the best picture of your company’s performance as well as having the ability to predict the directions that your competitors are headed in.

1. 6 GREAT COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE DATA SOURCES
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Gathering more data for your competitive intelligence (CI) will allow you
to have the best picture of your company’s performance as well as
having the ability to predict the directions that your competitors are
headed in.
Making sure that you have a solid plan for analyzing the data that you
collect is important; especially if you are going to use all 6 off these data
sources to collect copious amounts of data.
The decision making ability will increase immensely as you harness the
data that you can collect from these 6 great CI data sources.
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1. TOOLBAR DATA
Toolbars can offer people additional functionality for their browsing
experience.
As they are available and widely used from all of the major search
engines and they collect limited information about browsing habits, you
can gain this data and run a CI tool to leverage the information.
The information can be used to help you find search terms used, time
spent on each page, and pages visited. The toolbars are used by millions
of people and can be a great source of information that will give you
broad CI data.
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2. PANEL DATA
Panel data is a well-established method of collecting data, but it was
designed for early browsing habits.
The data that is collected for Panel Data comes from a piece of
monitoring software that is installed on the user’s computer and will
give fine details about all of their browsing habits.
Large competitive intelligence companies such as comScore and Nielsen
use panel data as a primary source.
Because of the limitations it is best to corroborate this data with other
data points.
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3. ISP DATA
Everyone uses internet service providers (ISP’s) to access the internet.
As you surf the Web, all of the browsing data is stored in server log files
including: sites, page names, keywords searched, browser types, and
operating systems.
While there are large data samples for CI, the information is increasing
hard to get your hands on.
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4. SEARCH ENGINE DATA
All of the searches that are entered into the search engines are logged,
along with IP address and browser information.
With the increased access to tools such as Google Adwords, you can
mine the data and find all sorts of relevant CI information from a highly
reliable source that is great for determining ad spends.
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5. BENCHMARKS FROM WEB ANALYTICS
VENDORS.
All businesses like data, and since web analytics can offer a large
amount of data most people offer some in exchange.
This data is then analyzed and formulated into benchmark data that you
can use to compare your company and your competitors to.
As another competitive intelligence tool in the toolbox you can use this
benchmark data to get a great idea of the industry’s performance
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6. SELF-REPORTED DATA
An increasingly common method of collecting data is through the self-
reported data that people offer to Google’s Ad Planner in exchange for
advertising revenue.
This data is clean and often a great place to focus attention if your
competitor is pushing their data through the self-reporting softwares.
The CI data that you can get from self-reported data can be some of the
best as it is directly from your competitors.
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9. For additional information about Competitive Intelligence
please visit www.Intelligence2act.com