Wednesday, October 10

Analysis of your competitors


Being able to monitor the performance of your business is vital. But what is more important is tracking your competitors and how the market is responding to them. You're looking for gaps in their offering, weaknesses and strengths. Anything to give you an edge.

In this day of Web 2.0, collaborative, social-networking, comment-generation, community-controlled content, do you know how your company is fairing in the market? Do you know your website popularity? It would be great knowing whether you are driving more traffic than your competitors, wouldn't it?

Whether you're a vendor trying to build an online community (like BO's Insight) or you want to know the site visited by the most people for BI information (aside from this blog, of course), doing this analysis is challenging especially when you don't know where to start.

Look no further.

Rich McIver sent me this post about "25 Tools to Compile an In-Depth Dossier on a Competitors' Site". This is the most comprehensive list (with descriptions for the less technically savvy people like myself) of analytical websites giving you intelligence on:
  • Who owns a domain name
  • Analyzing website traffic
  • Hosting information
  • Marketing and advertizing spending
  • Trademarks and filings
  • Public relations
  • Finacials
  • Browser compatibility, accessiblity and website security
To test drive this oracle of information, I did a simple website traffic analysis of Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion (see the picture at the top of this post) using http://www.compete.com/. I'll leave the analysis to yourself.

1 comment:

RonDimon said...

Thanks for sharing that post and your insight. I also like www.stratascope.com - although it's expensive, it gives you the last 4 rolling quarters financial comparisons and trends for competitors based off of SEC filings. So I can see who's ahead of the pack in
- Revenue Growth
- SG&A Expense
- Cost of Goods Sold
- Days Sales Outstanding
- Profitability
etc.