Nicola Arcieri

5 tools for assessing your online competitors

Site audience comparison tools provide marketers with industry and competitor intelligence to help inform decisions (e.g. new markets, new content strategies). Some of these tools also provide powerful segmentation capabilities. Typically, they do this either by aggregating Internet Service Provider data, panel data or a mixture of the two.

Whether you’re launching a new product, entering a new market or wishing to understand what’s driving competitor growth, these tools can provide the relevant information to help inform key decisions. They’re often used to support business cases, helping to identify opportunities and threats in the competitor landscape. So if you are looking to map your competition, build a case for a new product line or more investment in your website, these tools can be extremely useful.

Key things to consider before purchasing and when using these tools:

• Some of these tools require significant investment. They also provide huge amounts of raw data. It’s important to recognise that getting the most from these tools requires dedicated resource; agencies and brands with dedicated analytics teams will likely glean the most value from these tools. Although limited, some (e.g. SimilarWeb) have a free version and most will provide free trials.
• Accuracy isn’t guaranteed. Bear this mind especially if other sources of data are limited when informing key decisions. If testing tools from this category, compare the metrics in each tool with the data in your web analytics (they won’t match exactly). Making these checks periodically is recommended once you’ve invested.
• Data collection options. Due to the way these tools collect their data, there continue to be questions over the accuracy of the mobile statistics provided. Make this a key point of discussion with any of the providers you speak to in this category.

SimilarWeb

You can use these tool to compare the number of visits between sites, which can help make the case for more investment in your own site. You can also learn about acquisition tactics from the breakdown in traffic sources and keywords how your competitors are driving visits to their site. There is a free version and Chrome extension which provides top level data for a handy benchmark.

We think this is now the best free benchmarking tool with the paid service offering good visibility. As with all of these benchmarking services, you have to review the accuracy of the sample. In the case of SimilarWeb it’s based on browser toolbars and extensions.

Key features:

• Free version compares visits between sites broken down by channel
• Paid version compares organic and paid keywords
• Review most popular pages and campaign strength (paid version)
• Mobile app engagement (paid version)

Alexa

This is a free tool at it’s most basic version but paid plans let you see more details and results. This is a great tool for a quick look at a site domain, providing it is getting a decent traffic volume. Tools and visualizations are very easy to use, and although the free version offers limited insight, it can give indicative data. For smaller sites, free tools can offer little data. However, the paid-for tool offers a large variety of additional data to go into greater depth. Remember that like competitors, although based on a sample of millions of Internet users, data is only representative of users who have downloaded one of the browser extensions.  Another benefit is that its API can be integrated to validate your own analytics software, but also allow comparisons against competitor sites.

Key features:

• Competitor intelligence to benchmark against competitors
• Onsite intelligence to improve upon own site performance and highlight issues through site audit tools.

Google Analytics Benchmarking

This is a free but little known about features within Google Analytics which enables a top level view of the number of visits within a given industry sector. This is a neat feature in Google Analytics which you may not be aware of since it was re-introduced in 2014. You can choose between 1,600 different industry sectors. It’s useful because it is based on most accurate figures – recorded directly by Google Analytics across many sites within a specific category. However, the figures are anonymised and it doesn’t give you exact numbers. That means it is good for rough benchmark but can’t be used to establish how competitors are performing.

Key features:

• Industry-wide Benchmarks provided for visits and engagement
• Most accurate data available

Compete

Compete is a powerful tool which lets you monitor online competition, benchmark performance against industry, and discover new business opportunities. It’s a paid tool with no free version available.

This service offers a great depth of cross-industry data to businesses with multi-functions e.g. sales, marketing, analysis, research etc. It is a key tool for larger businesses with multiple users and need for data driven campaigns and competitor monitoring, and agencies covering a variety of clients with different requirements. It comes are a high cost though, but does include training and support to get the most from the tool. Other major advantages include a great data visualization dashboard and the ability to drill-down up to 2 years past.

Key features:

• Understand audience share of website
• Reach, engagement and loyalty metrics for a domains
• Build upon SEO and SEM strategies
• Keyword and click data for domains

Experian Hitwise

Experian Hitwise provides benchmarking of websites with detailed audience breakdown, so you can understand audience behaviour across different websites and devices. It is an enterprise level solution for large organisations looking for demographic information and understanding of customer journeys. It gives you access to demographic information and good quality keyword data for comparing paid and natural keywords. The big down side is that Hitwise has no insight available for non-customers. It’s strengths are a good quality sample based on collaboration with ISPs and integration of audience data. It’s part of a large marketing suite, so evaluate it alongside the other features it offers.

• Benchmark visits to sites across different sites broken down by channel
• Understand competitor strategies for affiliate marketing, display and search
• Understand customer journeys through upstream and downstream visits

 

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Multichannel attribution data feeds back into Google AdWords and DoubleClick Search to inform bidding optimizations.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk thinks he can make his company as valuable as Apple — by “going at the machine that makes the machine.”

MarketWatch reports that three Tesla manufacturing facilities across the U.S. will soon start trying out the company’s advanced robotics machinery and software to crank out the Model 3 car, its batteries and solar panels made under Musk’s new SolarCity merger. Another Tesla factory in California, which is closed for renovations, used to produce about 100,000 vehicles per year. When it reopens with the upgraded machine-making machinery, Musk believes it could be churning out five times that many by the end 2018.

“I think this is just going to be a very difficult thing for other manufacturers to copy,” Musk said. “I don’t know what to do if I were in their position.”

Apple manufactures much of its products abroad through contacted services, which Musk thinks is where his company might find its edge through mastery of automation. Tesla also uses contract manufacturing for some of its parts, however, while both companies offer similar maintenance services through walk-in locations and remote digital updates.

“If we’re able to maintain a 50% growth rate for 10 years and achieve 10% profitability number and have a 20 P/E, our market cap would be basically the same as Apple’s is today,” Musk said in 2015. “Now, that’s going to require a bit—on the order of $700 [billion]. Obviously, getting there will require some significant capex.”

This story originally appeared on Fortune.com. Copyright 2017

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Analytics is a big part of online marketing and therefore, it’s essential to have a good understanding of how to interpret numbers.

In this post, I’m going to present four statistical concepts I believe will be valuable to anyone working in online marketing.

Statistics: A Sexy Skill

To some people, statistics may sound like a boring topic, but to others, it may very well be one of the most attractive skills. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, even calls it sexy:

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades […]

The first three abilities mentioned by Hal Varian are all reflected in the quality of your work. That is the ability to understand, process and extract value from data.

And the last two – that is the ability to visualize and communicate data – are reflected in your relationships with clients or your boss. Good work is worth nothing if you can’t communicate it to your clients.

In LinkedIn’s yearly summary of the hottest skills you will also find statistics in the top:

Data isn’t going anywhere. Our top skill category last year, statistical analysis and data mining, is still sitting comfortably at #2. It is the only skill category that is consistently ranked in the top 4 across all of the countries we analyzed. We still live in an increasingly data-driven world, and businesses are still aggressively hiring experts in data storage, retrieval and analysis.

So let’s take a look at some of the statistical concepts online marketers should know.

1. The Pareto Principle

You have probably already heard about the Pareto principle. You may know it as the 80/20 rule as it states, according to Wikipedia, that “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”

The principle is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who found that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas and 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population.

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The Pareto principle occurs frequently, and by knowing this, you will be able to take advantage of it. If you can figure out which 20% of your time produces 80% of your business’ results, you can spend more time on those activities and less time on others.

Do you need to restructure an AdWords account but don’t have the time for a complete makeover? You can start by identifying the 20% keywords currently bringing the most sales and start from there.

Or maybe you need to increase conversion rates by optimizing the landing pages on a website with hundreds of landing pages? Again, you will probably find that around 20% of the landing pages are generating 80% of the conversions. So why not start there?

The Pareto principle is a simple heuristic that is often useful in online marketing.

2. The Law of Large Numbers

The law of large numbers tells us that if you repeat a random experiment often enough, the average of the outcomes will converge towards the expected value.

Take a series of coin tosses for example. Heads and tails have equal odds so you would expect each side to come up half the time. But if you were to toss the coin 10 times I bet you wouldn’t be too confident that each side would come up exactly 5 times. You can easily imagine scenarios where heads would come up six or seven times instead of five. Actually, it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine getting even eight heads out of ten tosses (there is more than a 4% chance of this happening).

Now, what if we changed the number of tosses from 10 to 1,000? Would this change anything? According to the law of large numbers, it should.

With ten tosses the thought of getting 80% heads wasn’t unheard of. But can you imagine tossing a coin 1,000 times and getting 800 heads? I doubt it. And rightly so. The chance of this happening is so small I would need 86 zeroes to type it out. With 1,000 tosses you would expect something closer to an equal amount of heads and tails than with 10 tosses.

So our coin-tossing example illustrates quite well what the law of large numbers tells us: The more we repeat a random experiment, the more will the outcomes converge towards the expected value.

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In his superb book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman tells the story of a large investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some researchers had tried to identify the most successful schools in the hope of discovering what distinguishes them from others.

One of the conclusions was that the most successful schools, on average, were small. And it’s not difficult to come up with possible explanations for this. Maybe smaller schools can give more personal attention and encouragement than larger schools.

Because of this, the Gates Foundation invested in the creation of smaller schools, even splitting large schools into smaller ones.

The problem is it’s wrong. As Kahneman writes:

If the statisticians who reported to the Gates Foundation had asked about the characteristics of the worst schools, they would have found that bad schools also tend to be smaller than average. The truth is that small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable.

Just like a small number of coin tosses are more variable than a larger number, a small school is also more variable than a large school.

How is this relevant in online marketing?

Let’s say you want to investigate which cities have the lowest conversion rate on your website. You might go to the Geo report in Google Analytics and sort by conversion rate in ascending order. And there you have it. The 10 cities with the lowest conversion rate. You might very well reach a conclusion similar to the statisticians reporting to the Gates Foundation: the low converting cities are all rather small.

But before initiating a big national campaign to increase brand awareness in small cities, you should take a look at the cities at the other end of the table. These high converting cities are probably also small. So perhaps the small cities are not worse or better than larger cities. They are probably just more variable due to fewer visitors.

The same applies to A/B tests and this is why you need a certain amount of data before you can rely on the results from an A/B test and call it statistical significant.

So what are we to do about it?

We should not make too hasty generalizations. The fallacy of making an assumption based on a small sample group is sometimes called the law of small numbers.

In cases like this where you are trying to identify the characteristics of the best or the worst of something, it would be wise to always check the other end of the spectrum. Sometimes you will find that the top and bottom share the same characteristics.

Let me show a final example. The graph below shows the value per session for every hour of the day. At first, it may seem like some of the nighttime hours are the most valuable hours of the day. But instead of just rushing to a conclusion we should consider the least valuable hours of the day. It appears that they are also at night.

Is there some reason why the data for the nighttime hours should be more variable than the rest of the day?

As the graph below shows, we only get a very small amount of traffic at night. This is just like the schools. One hour at night is like one small school. It could be really good (like 1, 4 and 6 in the morning) or really bad (like 2, 3 and 5 in the morning). But the difference might as well be due to randomness.

The law of large numbers tells us to put more trust in the value of the hours with many sessions than in the hours with only a few sessions.

3. Relative and Absolute Numbers

Imagine reading about a new drug that reduces the risk of getting a dangerous disease by 25%. At first, this might sound very promising but does it really tell us what the real benefit of taking the new drug is?

Let’s assume 20 in 1,000 people get the disease without the drug. By taking the drug, this number is reduced to 15 in 1,000 people. While this is indeed a 25% relative drop, we should also consider the absolute reduction.

In absolute numbers, the new drug has only reduced the number of people getting the disease from 20 in 1,000 to 15 in 1,000 people. So while it’s true that 25% fewer people get the disease, it’s also true that the actual risk of getting the disease is only 0.5 percentage points lower (reduced from 2.0% to 1.5%). Depending on potential side effects the new drug may not sound as promising anymore.

There is one important distinction to be made here. Percentage change must not be confused with a change in percentage points.

How is this relevant in online marketing?

If someone told you that the conversion rate of your website had been reduced by 2% you need to be sure what is implied by this number. Your reaction should be considerably different if the person meant to say the conversion rate has been reduced from 4% to 2% (a drop of 2 percentage points) than if it was just a reduction from 4% to 3.92% (a 2 percentage drop).

When talking about changes we need to make sure everyone knows what the numbers mean. Are we talking about the relative or absolute numbers? Are we using percentages or percentage points?

We also need to be especially wary of relative numbers when the starting point is a very small number. If your AdWords campaign is generating 50% fewer conversions, you won’t panic if it is just a drop from 2 conversions to 1. But if it’s a drop from 2,000 to 1,000 conversions then you might consider panicking. A drop of 1 conversion is probably just a random fluctuation while a drop of 1,000 conversions might be caused by a serious issue.

In the example above you can see exactly how percentages will mislead when the absolute numbers are low. While the goal completions is down by 50 percent and the conversion rate is down by 63 percent, the actual change in goals completed is just 1. Not exactly something that would make you panic.

It just shows how percentages can be misleading when the absolute numbers are omitted.

4. Simpson’s Paradox

Simpson’s paradox, as stated on Wikipedia, is the name of a paradox “in which a trend appears in different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.”

A textbook example of the Simpson’s paradox is the study of the 1973 admission figures for the University of California, Berkeley. The numbers showed that men applying were more likely than women to be admitted. 44% of all the men who applied got admitted while only 35% of women did.

The paradox arises when examining the individual departments since it appears that no department was significantly biased against women. As shown below, four of the six departments actually had a small bias in favor of women.

If you take a closer look at the number of applicants in the six departments, you will see that women tended to apply to generally competitive departments with low rates of admission (C, D, E, and F) while the majority of men applied to department A and B which have the highest admittance rate for both sexes.

So while the rate of women accepted is higher in 4 of the 6 departments, the total rate of admissions was higher for men because more men applied to departments with high rates of admission.

How is this relevant in online marketing you might ask?

Say you want to compare the performance of two landing pages on your website. Looking at the conversion rates you conclude that page A is better than page B since page A has a conversion rate of 4.39% compared to only 3.49% of page B.

But look what happens if we segment the two landing pages by the traffic sources:

Now we see that even though page A has a higher total conversion rate, page B is actually doing better for every individual traffic source. Page A is not better; it just happens to get a lot more of its traffic from the high converting traffic sources than page B does. This is Simpson’s paradox – just like the example with college admission figures.

So what are we to do about it?

First of all, we should make sure to run properly randomized trials. If the numbers above were from an actual split-test of two landing pages, it would clearly be flawed since the traffic sources are skewed that much.

Apart from that, we should remember to always segment our data. As Avinash Kaushik wrote in a blog post: “There is no KPI so insightful all by itself, even in a trend or against a forecast, that it can’t be made more impactful by applying segmentation.”

Conclusion

I hope you have found the four statistical concepts interesting and hopefully learned something new to help you in your work.

Knowledge of statistics will only get more important in online marketing, and by educating yourself, you can make sure to stay ahead in a world where we are getting access to more and more interesting data.

As Hal Varian said, the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians! And with the combination of statistical skills and online marketing you will possess some of the most attractive skills at the moment.

About the Author: Frederik Hyldig is the Head of PPC at s360 – one of the leading digital agencies in Scandinavia. Frederik has been featured on PPC Hero, Wordstream, Moz and other leading search marketing blogs.

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Creativity (cre·a·tiv·i·ty)
krēāˈtivədē
noun

1. the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.

Creativity may not immediately seem incredibly relevant to CRO. After all, CRO is often thought of as a study in best practices and procedural experimentation.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to look a little deeper.

Following best practices does matter of course. You should absolutely continue to optimize your pages with A/B testing, focusing on message-match and ensure your CTA’s are clear and concise.

But there are a number of interesting and entirely useful ways that you can “shake the trees” so to speak.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can flex your creative muscle to increase conversions.

Remind Me Why We Have to Do This?

One word. Oversaturation.

Users are increasingly “blind” to traditional forms of advertising. Just take a look at banner ads.

Users are essentially numb to them, and have been for a long time. In fact, studies show that users generally don’t even give site siderails a single consideration. I know I don’t, and I bet you don’t either.

This study showed that across all mediums and placements, CTR on banners lands somewhere around .05%. Yikes.

Same goes for spam emails, banners, popups… the list goes on.

I’m not saying these tactics don’t work, remarkably some of them still do. Banners are still valuable to expose new audiences to your brand identity even if they don’t garner clicks. Popups can still gather leads when implemented appropriately.

My point is, they’re no longer “fresh” enough to grab someone’s attention and create a memorable experience.

This is why leveraging creativity matters now more than ever. Without further ado, here are three wacky ways to do just that.

1. Be Original. Be Memorable.

“Just be yourself.”

I know, I know. This sounds like the advice Mom gave you before you went to summer camp. How’d it work out for you then? Stolen lunch money? Teasing?

While there are some potential downsides to being unique, particularly when surrounded by kids or teenagers, the perks can be pretty fantastic as well.

I’d go so far as to say that in the business world, being memorable is worth its weight in gold.

Many customers make buying decisions based off emotional responses to brands. Whether it be to an ad, an email, or maybe a customer review they saw on YouTube.

The brands that tell compelling and memorable stories are the ones that land the most sales.

By being memorable and evoking a positive response from leads, you too can capitalize on this. A few ways to accomplish this…

• Curate a quirky imagery style that you feature on ads, social platforms and your website. Moz does a fantastic job of this, check out their ad portfolio on MOAT.
• Come up with a memorable and unusual catch phrase, then shout it to the world. When I think about slogans, my mind always races to Redbull. “Redbull gives you wings” is to this day, one of the most impactful, concise, and informative slogans I can think of.
• Be disruptive with your advertising (screw the norms). Facebook canvas ads are a fantastic way to get creative with your approach. Check out this example by tieks.

Sticking out like a sore thumb is a good thing when it comes to converting leads. Making a lasting impression and being personable will endear your brand to leads.

Remember, you always want to view your digital funnel from the eyes of the visitor.

Discerning visitors have an inherent sense of authenticity. If you’re genuine with your approach to your product or service, that will come across loud and clear, and in turn builds trust.

The icing on the cake? The more a lead trusts you, the more likely they are to convert.

TLDR: Developing your brand’s unique voice and “personality” encourages consumer trust, which in turns produces sales.

2. Email Nurturing with Authenticity

We all know that email is massively effective when it comes to converting leads. It’s safe to assume each and everyone of you reading this tracks email signups as “goals” in your analytics platform of choice.

Hell, at RankPay we even have a tradition of lining up for high-fives when our MailChimp subscription level increases.

Here’s the problem with emailing nowadays: Email users, aka the vast majority of people, are increasingly savvy as to what constitutes something of value in their inbox. You can’t just send an email with any old subject header and expect a double-digit open rate.

It’s time again to bust out our creativity and buck the trend.

In short, we want to be the unforgettable brand that’s unique but not bizarre enough to be off-putting.

For instance, I recently landed an opportunity by breaking all of the rules. Even the ones deliberately laid out in the denial letter I first received.

With this in mind, start by taking a closer look at your own lead nurturing email campaigns. Are the subject lines innovative, quirky or unique? Do they have any personality?

Have some fun and try A/B testing novel subject lines where you let your personality shine through. Note that it’s OK if you hear your brain protesting…

“Play it safe! What are you doing? Best practices are established. You can’t go rogue like this!”

But do it. Click send. That quirky but endearing email subject line might be just what the doctor ordered.

When you have fun, your audience will recognize this intuitively. Smiles are infectious. Positive brand associations mean more conversions.

3. Write Marketing Copy to Appeal to Emotions

Every chance you have to put words in front of your leads, is a chance to sell them on your solution. But without appealing to a lead’s emotions, we’re wasting these opportunities.

It’s understandable that us marketers occasionally struggle with this part. We become intimately familiar with our products and services, and it can become difficult to see the forest for the trees. That is to say that we lose sight of what a customer journey looks like from the prospect’s point of view.

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One negative outcome of this lack of perspective can be uninspired copywriting. No need to be hard on yourself, it happens to all of us! Present company included.

Just the other day I caught myself writing a headline for a lead-nurturing email as follows: “The Best SEO Service for Small Businesses”. That’s all well and good. It’s a fairly standard headline in that it clearly highlights our company’s service and our target audience. But it’s not memorable and I’m not sure it will truly “connect” with readers.

Luckily I realized it, and took a step back to brainstorm. In the end, I decided to go with “The easy, affordable way to earn higher rankings.” This version has a lot going for it.

• It’s punchy
• It’s catchy
• It connects with the problems this reader faces (budget and difficulty)
• It conveys authority
• It explains what we do

And again, I’d point out that being memorable matters. Generic = forgettable. Unique = memorable.

Let’s take a look at a few places you can put this to work for your business.

Company motto or slogan

Day in and day out I see brands without a good catch phrase.

Look at it this way: every single person is inundated with brand exposures from the moment they wake up. Some studies show individuals being exposed to literally thousands of ads each day.

Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today. – New York Times

The thing is, there’s only so much room in our brains to remember all of these brand impressions. It’s thus critical that we aim to be one of the few brands that leaves a truly lasting impression.

When I’m helping clients develop these “quick pitches”, my process looks like this:

• Brainstorm as many ideas as I can (25-100)
• Pick the best 10-15
• Iterate and improve
• Get third-party feedback
• Finalize 3-5 versions
• A/B test for resonance

It’s so simple it hurts. But at the end of the day, it works.

Headlines

When it comes to being creative with your headlines, start by asking yourself a few key questions.

• Does this convey our solution’s value to the customer?
• Is it punchy and concise?
• Does it appeal to emotions?
• Is it consistent with our overall “story”?

These questions should get your gears turning and the creative juices flowing.

Remember, we want to craft a memorable message that our leads will not forget. We also want to make sure that we evoke an emotional response and appeal to the potential customer’s needs or desires.

Check out this killer example…

It’s got everything going for it. It’s punchy and unique. The wording matches the imagery. The use of the word savor as a verb is particularly great because it elicits a clearly emotional response from the audience. Who wouldn’t want to eat whatever they’re serving at this place?

Calls to action

You’ve probably already spent a lot of time optimizing the button size, color and placement. If not, be sure to check this guide on how to improve the efficacy of your CTAs in general.

Regarding the wording however, it’s important to take the chance to put something personal in the actual text. Instead of using a button that says “Submit” try something like “Start My Trial” or “Boost My Rankings”.

Copyblogger clearly showed data that corroborates using “first-person” CTA text will increase conversions. Cool right?

Last but not least, remember to be unique. Don’t be afraid to let personality shine through. Here’s an example of both a CTA and a form that I immediately loved.

Remember, Being Weird Isn’t So Bad

If you’ve watched Freaks and Geeks, you probably already believe this statement. If you’re more of the Biff type, there’s nothing wrong with you either. We love everyone here.

But I hope you’ll take the time to consider the advice above, as it can really work wonders on your conversion rate.

The key takeaways are to embrace personality, be genuine, and appeal to your customers emotions. The more a customer trusts your brand and remembers your message, the more likely they are to buy.

Write interesting copy, be weird with your subject lines, and be memorable! Let your freak flag fly!

About the Author: Sam is the marketing manager at RankPay, a top-rated SEO service. When Sam’s not writing or growing businesses, he enjoys talking about himself in the third person.

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