How to leverage free online measurement tools to find out what your competitors are doing. Originally presented at SURFACES / STONEXPO 2013.

1. January 2013
Doing Competitive
Research
How to research your competitors and
benchmark your performance
9/24/2013#SURFACES #StonExpo 1

2. Accurate but limited: Compete.com
• Based on panel
• Two month lag
• Will not work for
website that get
less than 10K
visitors / month
9/24/2013#SURFACES #StonExpo 2

3. Accurate but can’t export it: Alexa.com
• Sample of opt-in users
only
• More focused on
reputation and ranking
• Does not do well except
for sites that get more
than 100K visitors / month
9/24/2013#SURFACES #StonExpo 3

4. Less accurate but everything is here: SiteTrail.com
• This is a start-up
• Most data needs to
be manually
refreshed
• Has everything:
— Traffic
— Social
— SEO
9/24/2013#SURFACES #StonExpo 4

5. How would I use this?
• Mostly to understand where you are relative to your competitors
Metric John Deere Caterpillar
Employee rating 3.5 3.5
CEO approval 87% 90%
Facebook likes 1,481,476 106,707
Facebook talking about 35,394 2,108
Facebook engagement 2.4% 2.0%
Twitter followers 31,982 28,162
Twitter following 65 58
Twitter FTF ratio 492 486
YouTube subscribers 9,809 7,276
YouTube Video Views 5,527,359 9,437,611
Unique Website Visitors 18,263 56,198
9/24/2013#SURFACES #StonExpo 5

6. BONUS: Inside intel with GlassDoor.com
• GlassDoor.com is
where employees go to
anonymously rate their
employer
9/24/2013#SURFACES #StonExpo 6