How well are we doing?
This is a question I get asked quite often. And to be honest, the first times they asked me this, I couldn’t give a complete answer. And to be even more honest, it still gives me quite a hard time.
If your working with big brands, most of the time their management isn’t interested really in visitors, conversion rate or even the conversion itself. They are used to being this data available. Offcourse they are glad to hear the number of conversions has increased, the bounce rate cut in halve and visitors returning more often, but their main indicator is market share. If our conversation has doubled, who says the conversion rate of our main competitor hasn’t tripled?
Big brands management is used to having this data available in the offline market. With having a lot of more data online, we still don’t have the transparency we see offline. All though market researchers are doing quite some good job already (Comscore, Hitwise, even Google’s Ad Planner en Trends give us insight in marketing shares) market shares still aren’t as transparant as we would like to be.
To present your data in a broader perspective, I’ve summed up some tips to give a better answer to the question: “How well are we doing”.
Define the right competition:
I often see marketers who only want to benchmark their results to offline competitors and therefor miss quite some online competition and market share. To get a greater insight on your online competitors, take a look at SERP’s (search engine result pages) and see who’s also ranking on your top keyword, sign up to affiliate networking programs and see within a certain niche who’s advertising there and even what they are offering for a sale. You’ll be amazed how much companies you see there which you haven’t heard of before.
Use the data that’s available:
Allthough not all online data is accurate, do use it! Each data source may not have the right numbers, but combining several sources will give you trends and will also give you an overview where to place your brand.
Use your search engines:
Search engines give a great insight in how well your competitors are doing in the one of the most traffic driven sources on the internet. Since search engines still have the highest traffic numbers, it’s key to have great positions on your top keywords. Simply pull of a ranking report on your most competitive keywords (lot’s of free and paid tools available for this, just search for ranking reports) and see which competitors have the best positions and which don’t. If you have great rankings and your competitor doesn’t, you’re sure his missing out quite some traffic and conversions.
I hope these tips give you some help to answer “How well are we doing?”. Please feel free to add your tips and comments below.
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