Where to start your Competitive Analysis and Market Research

With the recent new tools from Google and with the use of a few other tools on the internet there’s quite a lot of information we can find both in regards to ourselves and/or our competitors. These tools can be used to research deeper into our target market and find new ideas and places in to which to expand our sites’ reach.

Now, I have to say that this post’s main objective is to present a few free analytic tools and shortly summarize what they can do.

To really understand competitive analysis and market research there is a need for an entire series of blog posts. Something on the lines of the posts in Avinash Kaushik’s blog on the subject, which I recommend reading

While writing this post, I tried to separate the competitive analysis from the market research but I found that it’s easier to talk about the tools used in the processes, as they are sometimes used for both.

1. Compete.com – Despite the fact that most of the deeper analysis is for paid subscribers there are still quite a few things that can be learned in regards to traffic from the US to your site compared to your competitors. The following graph shows the unique visitors count (as seen by compete.com) to two sites from the same domain:

Example of Compete.com Information

Apart from the unique visitors count the graphs can show visitors engagement with your site.

According to Compete.com:

“Attention considers all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site.

Attention is a powerful way to plan and measure the web because it is a finite resource that we manage selfishly. ”

Compete is definitely a tool you should use if you want to gain some fast insight into your performance vs. your competition. Although the numbers aren’t dead on, the trends are usually pretty good. You can really obtain a good idea of what’s up.

1. Google Trends – This tool from Google can be a useful tool for both competitive analysis and market research. You start by entering a search word and pressing the “search trends” button. Then the fun begins. The next screen shows you the trends for that word and even segments it into geographical regions and languages. On this screen you can also choose to see the trends for specific websites which will also show you other sites that were visited by the same users, keywords used and the regions they came from:

Example of trends.google.com

1. Google Ad Planner and Quantcast – Both tools are very effective when it comes to competitive analysis and market research. Although Google ad planner is mainly there to help you decide on your advertising strategies it certainly reveals quite a lot about a site’s traffic, audience characteristics, other sites the visitors saw and the keywords they used. Note: Right now the Ad planner is in beta stage and you need to apply for an account.

Quantcast – which has to be one of my favorites is very similar in what it does to the Ad planner but at least for now I find it more informative, especially when it comes to competitive analysis. The summary page is absolutely bursting with information starting with demographics (mainly US), estimated traffic, other sites visited by the visitors, traffic frequency, keywords and categories. And this is only on the first page!

Example of Quantcast.com

There are quite a few more tools out there that can be used for competitive analysis and/or market research but these are the ones I like to use, that are free and that give me a quick insight when I need it. When I need to run a quick analysis for a website, it’s usually the first 10 minutes on my analysis.

Wait!

Before you go and research your competitors or find new markets to conquer, I have to say that the number of visits may and most likely will vary between the different tools so what you should be looking at are the trends not the numbers. Also, most of the tools mentioned are more accurate for the US (some work almost only for the US) then for other regions.

Now go! The information is out there and it’s waiting for you to use it.