Competitor Analysis

You might be amazed at how different the reality is from a personal impression.

If for example you were thinking of opening up a new shop in a particular location, you might look to see how many competitors that would be similar to yours in the surrounding area - you would look at their prices - you would look at how their shops are laid out - you would look at they type of customer they attracted - you would look at the quality of staff etc.

Before you invested your money an a physical presence, you would 'check out' your competitors wouldn't you?

These are physical features you can deal with and assess to guage what your likely return on investment would be and quite rightly so you should!

The Internet and its audience is quite different in many ways. We have prevented many companies over the years from making costly decisions based on 'gut feeling' rather than evidence.  This is particularly true when you look at your competitor's sites. 

Of course you could be right in thinking that other sites are better than yours - the truth of the matter is that you'll never know.  You can't sit outside and watch what is going on.

You generally will take a subjective approach and have to ask yourself what it is you like better in their site than yours.  

This is always a good starting point when thinking about design.  We're not suggesting copying, but there can be feature and layout improvements that can make all the difference when you consider specifying what you are wanting.

Many businesses think that their graphics need to be better than other sites as this is important. Whilst it may be true to an extent, it is certainly not like the signage on your shop. Firstly, you must know haw to attract the right customers and then look at how to present the information YOU want them to see and make the browsing/purchase process as simple and secure as possible.

Often we will hear comments like:  That site must be really busy because we are always hearing about how good it is - propoganda, rumour or speculation - it doesn't matter - unless you can see the reality of this, you could end up spending a lot on money upgrading your site when in fact, your site could already be totally outperforming theirs.

Because the Internet is 'virtual' there is no visible way to prove what websites are actually turning over - they may attract thousands of visitors who buy very little.

We will help you to understand how to look beyond the images and page layouts and show you tools to help measure what is going on. This exercise should be part of the project plan and lifecycle.

You need to understand the value of analytics information, how to get it and realise the the days of assessing the popularity of your website through the number if 'hits' you got were antiquated years ago.  This is a worthless and unimportant metric now but there are still businesses who consider this as a good measure of popularity.

Contact us to discuss your perceptions and see how we can help.