Competitive Intelligence. Why?

Why?: There is a revenue opportunity using competitive intelligence!

I think it’s naive to believe that you control your own web setting. You might control your website, but numerous factors way beyond site optimization have impact on your Revenue! – and more often than not, a revenue impact is due to competitor actions. It’s time to recognize that your own silo of data is only half the picture. You are dangerously putting your revenue at risk if all your decisions are based on inward looking data, as in e.g. clickstream data - you have to count in the overall industry setting.

The good thing however; is that there is everything from FREE competitive intelligence tools to high end tools, such as:

• www.alexa.com (-)
• www.compete.com (-)
• www.ranking.com (-)
• www.chart.dk (- local Danish CI portal, I am quite sure you could find one in each country)
• www.hitwise.com ($)
• www.comscore.com ($)

But it should not be discounted that the Search Engines provide some very valuable competitive insights as well (for free).

www.adwords.google.com
www.adcenter.microsoft.com

Let me try to illustrate, by using an example, what I am talking about when I say that there is valuable actions to take, analyzing competitive intelligence. As a very basic example using the infamous Alexa – the competitive intelligence feature: “related links” – which in reality is upstream analysis and downstream analysis (of course not on a level as we know it from enterprise tools like e.g. HitWise). Forgetting for a moment that this data might be flawed – it’s super interesting to see that Clicktracks (a IndexTools Web Analytics vendor competitor) have visitors visit the following links before and after they visit ClickTracks.com

Sample Alexa “Related Links” for clicktracks.com:

• www.webtrends.com (Log Analysis vendor)
• www.sitelogz.com (Log Analysis vendor)
• www.newmanservices.com/logjam (Log Analysis vendor)
• www.urchin.com (Log Analysis vendor)

Where this initial finding, that visitors to the ClickTracks website are searching the web for "log analysis software", can be further confirmed by using the “Google AdWords - Related Keywords” competitive intelligence feature.

Google Related Keywords for clicktracks.com:

• log file
• log
• logs

CI CONCLUSION:
And based upon the above, one could (or at least for sake of this blog post) conclude that the visitors have a focus, or at least stronger focus than my initial stance, on log analysis software, when visiting clicktracks.com. And with that in mind we could conclude that they (hi John) have more revenue coming from software licensees than from ASP subscriptions.

CI ACTION:
I should remove ClickTracks from my immediate top level competitor list – as I do not provide a log analysis software package (or have any plans of doing so). I should investigate whether there really is two very differently customer segments - by looking at competitive intelligence for a pure on-demand (ASP) vendor as well.

I would like to dig even deeper into the competitive intelligence subject later, but I hope the above gave you an indication on WHY I think CI is important - You can read some in depth post about the subject as well from both Avinash’s and Marshall’s blogs.