Competitor Analysis Strategy - Are you really doing it right?

What is your competitor strategy?

In today’s time, everyone is competing for similar products or services. The cost of advertising is going up. Maintaining a market share is important. It is a situation of innovation or death. Competitor analysis can uncover a lot of hidden treasures that keep you ahead in the game.

Customers today have a lot of choices. They see you as just another ad or service provider. What sets you apart and makes your product unique? To answer these questions, you need to know who are your competitors. What products or services do they sell. Are they advertising effectively, if so what are their advertising methods? You need to know about their strength & weaknesses.

In this post, we talk about how you can use digital advertising to uncover some of the hidden gems in competitive analysis.

Before you look at your competitors, it is important to ensure that your doing the things right at home first. Answer the below questions:

Do you know how much traffic is coming to your website from each marketing channel
Are you getting the right type of traffic – check your time on site and bounce rates
What are they doing on your website, top pages, keywords, devices where they go next
Have you set up goals and objectives to measure the key metrics which matter to you. ( micro-moments )
If you are advertising, what kind of ad message are your display.
Have you set up proper landing pages and conversion tracking to measure success?
Are you already following the best practices with many new google ads and Facebook ads updates?
Talk to us to find answers to the above points

In digital marketing, a continued user experience is very important. What you promise in your ads or SEO titles is important to follow through on your landing page too. For example – you say free shipping or a 20% discount in the ad copy, but when they click your ads and visit the site, it’s not mentioned anywhere. Else the promise is broken and the user goes elsewhere.

Continuity is very important in the customer journey. Right from visibility in moments that matter –> enticing with nice creative ad –> bringing the traffic on the right page what the user is looking for, and a seamless process to complete the journey. This continuity is what increases conversion rates. We have noticed that if all things are put together, the conversion rates are generally high on paid search

If you’re doing your competitor analysis, make sure you’re not using wrong information trends from them. There are many tools that can tell you the competitor’s best ads, keywords, landing pages, and what’s working for them. You can even see if someone is using your brand name in their ads or copyright issues. Some of the tools we found from hanapin marketing webinars are.

You could go to your Google Analytics too, but there is a problem with Google Analytics measuring conversions based on last-click attribution. This means, that if a user clicks or sees your ads 30 days ago, but came today via SEO traffic and converted, Analytics will give credit to the SEO traffic for this conversion, not the previous interaction. This is not accurate data. To address this problem, Google has come up with data-driven attribution modeling which is position-based. Meaning every touch point from the customer journey gets equal credit for you to analyze how your marketing is performing. This is the true picture.

Google Adwords has a competitor analysis tool built-in called auction insights

This tells you who is bidding for the same keywords in paid search and who is showing in what position, what number of times, and how you stack up against them. Talk to us for a free audit on your adwords account and uncover some news for you.

Final Thing,

If you’re doing only SEO, and not search ads, you’re missing out. Google Shows 4 ads above your normal ranking. Sometimes if it is a location-based search query too, there are maps above SEO results. So you can’t just rest on SEO alone. There could be a lot of competitors who can bid on your keywords and rank above you to take away those precious clicks. The nasty hijackers.