How to analyze a competitor’s website knowing only the URL

A good product, in addition to monitoring the metrics of its site/product/application, should look rather actively towards competitors, checking daily how they are doing and whether they have run too far ahead (we mean that the product is really good and competitors are identified). In addition to controlling significant improvements (decided by subscribing to news channels and installing a competitor application), in a good way, you also need to control traffic and the main metrics of competitors. Or at least get these metrics once in order to determine your place in the “food chain” and focus on them as a benchmark.

And if there are a huge number of tools for controlling their metrics and all of them are quite well-known and easy to use, then obtaining competitor metrics has always been labor-intensive and non-obvious, because for many non-public (and public too) companies DAU, Conversion Rate and other product metrics are sensitive information and they do not intend to actively share it.

In this article, I offer tools that will allow you to analyze a competitor’s site on the knee and get meaningful business insights, having only a URL in your hands.

The total number of users. Traffic sources

One of the most powerful tools for getting company insights is similarweb. The service provides web analytics, data mining and business intelligence services. With only the URL in hand, we get:

a) DAU, traffic breakdown by device and key engagement metrics: average visit time average page views per session

Rice.  1. DAU and engagement metrics

Rice. 1. DAU and engagement metrics

Note 1: If we want to get the CR (Conversion Rate) for a specific site element (banner, widget), we take the link to which this element leads and also run it through similarweb. We get traffic for this link, and by simply dividing this indicator by the total site traffic, we get CR (Conversion Rate) in this element. Exactly the same can be done with all the steps of the funnel and build a tree of metrics for a competitor site.

b) Marketing channels. Traffic by them, broken down by months

Rice.  2. Overview of marketing channels

Rice. 2. Overview of marketing channels

Rice.  3. Traffic by channels, broken down by months

Rice. 3. Traffic by channels, broken down by months

c) Sites that link to a competitor site and sites to which a competitor’s site leads

Rice.  4. Incoming traffic: sites that link to a competitor site

Rice. 4. Incoming traffic: sites that link to a competitor site

Rice.  5. Outbound Traffic: Sites Linked to by a Competitor Site

Rice. 5. Outbound Traffic: Sites Linked to by a Competitor Site

Note 2: often in outgoing traffic there are links like wbpay.ru, sberpay.ru. These are links to payment systems. Thus, having the total number of visits and the number of transitions to payment systems, we can get another important competitor metric – CR (Conversion Rate) in payment.

d) Traffic from social networks

Rice.  6. Distribution of traffic on social networks and instant messengers

Rice. 6. Distribution of traffic on social networks and instant messengers

Rice.  7. Breakdown of social traffic by months

Rice. 7. Breakdown of social traffic by months

e) Demographic analysis of the audience

Rice.  8. Gender and age analysis of the audience of the competitor site

Rice. 8. Gender and age analysis of the audience of the competitor site

Each of these parameters (metrics) has a deeper detail. For example, you can study in detail the search queries that users most often search for a site for. It is also possible to compare competitors’ sites with your own or among themselves for all selected parameters. It is also worth noting that the service has a 7-day trial version, later you will have to pay for the wide analysis capabilities.

At the first stage of analytics, we have already received sufficiently detailed data and key metrics, on the basis of which we can build hypotheses and project them onto our product.

Getting Site Versions

If we need to analyze a competitor’s traffic in more detail, or just get to know how their site has changed over time, in conjunction with similarweb, we can use the Wayback Machine tool, a free Internet archive that saves versions of web pages with the help of search robots.

Rice.  9. Saved copies of competitor site pages

Rice. 9. Saved copies of competitor site pages

It is also possible to construct a number of hypotheses at this stage. For example, when the page changed (the appearance of what elements: banners, banners, buttons, etc.), the traffic changed the most (we got it from similarweb).

Website performance analysis

Let’s go even deeper. Let’s analyze the site loading speed and its performance (parameters that indirectly strongly affect the perception of the site by customers). To do this, we will use the PageSpeed ​​Insights tool.

Rice.  10. Competitor Site Performance Metrics

Rice. 10. Competitor Site Performance Metrics

With this tool, we get a whole set of metrics that show how quickly the site loads and how it is perceived by the user, namely:

  1. Main content download speed (LCP)

  2. TTFB is a metric that measures the time between a request for a resource and the start of the first byte of the response.

  3. Cumulative Layout Offset (CLS) is a user-centric metric that measures the visual stability of a site and how often users experience unexpected layout shifts.

And a whole set of other metrics that allow you to quantify the technical component of the site, as well as get metrics that reflect the direct perception of the site’s speed and ease of use (for example, a metric showing the presence of an image with an incorrect aspect ratio on the site).

Visual site audit

Next, we will analyze the visual component of the site and draw up its proposed heatmap. Recall that we only have the URL in our hands and we cannot use tools like Yandex.Metrica. To do this, we use feng-gui – a service that draws a heat map of an image or page based on internal algorithms and machine learning.

We upload the link to the service and get the following data (for example, the OZON website was taken):

Rice.  11. Site Heatmap

Rice. 11. Site Heatmap

Based on this heat map, you can also make several fairly important hypotheses and test them using the above services. For example, using a heat map, get the elements that the user focuses on the most and compare their Conversion Rate using similarweb (Note 1).

We go deep. Google Chrome Developer Tools

Using the Google Chrome developer tools, you can also get some important business insights.

Example: we go to the site of any marketplace, open the developer tools, add the product to the cart and see what response came from the API of this marketplace.

Rice.  12. Using developer tools

Rice. 12. Using developer tools

Specifically, from this request, we received the type of vendor identifier (11-00000000000000000012). By making several queries, you can make a hypothesis about the total number of suppliers. Also from this request, we got the supplier’s work schedule, which is not displayed on the front.

In addition to the fact that we can get some data that is not displayed on the front of the site, we can also top-level evaluate the architecture of a competitor company (what methods are used (types, etc.), what are the rules for naming fields in json).

Instead of output

With only the URL of a competitor site in hand, in an hour and a half, using the proposed tools, you can get a huge amount of data and use it when analyzing competitors or building a strategy for your product.

The data we received:

  • Custom Metrics

  • Engagement Metrics

  • Traffic sources

  • Website version history

  • Site performance analysis and user perception

  • Approximate site heat map

  • Conversion

Further analysis of these metrics and the extent to which they are used is limited only by the imagination and skills of the product).

Note 3: This article does not pretend to be a deep analysis of the analytics services of competing companies that are on the market and their detailed description, but is aimed at showing an approach that can be applied.

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