3 best practices for optimizing your ecommerce strategy with competitive intelligenc

1. 3 Best Practices for
OptimizingYour
Ecommerce Strategy with
Competitive Intelligence
What you will gain from this report
Electronic commerce (ecommerce) is a rapidly growing
business as an ever-increasing number of digitally savvy
consumers spend more of their time and money online.
This report will demonstrate how you can leverage
competitive intelligence to launch or improve your
ecommerce strategy. Learn how to identify your prospects
when and where they are most likely to buy, anticipate
holes in your sales funnel to recover lost conversions, and
effectively benchmark your performance against that of
your competitors to improve your online marketing ROI.

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Is Ecommerce Right forYou?
Before you can adopt or improve ecommerce
for your business, you should have a solid
understanding of what electronic commerce
actually is and whether or not it’s an arena you
should be exploring. An easy—oversimplified—way
to think about ecommerce is as an online storefront
where shoppers can buy whatever you’re selling
online without any personal interaction. Ecommerce
is often the best strategy for established businesses
to grow and scale to a larger market. By reducing
the amount of personal interaction you must have
with your prospective customers during the sales
process a business can become more efficient and
better focus its marketing efforts.
Lastly, you need to consider your industry
standards. Are your competitors and similar
companies leveraging an ecommerce platform?
If you’re not sure, you can use Compete PRO’s
Related Sites feature in combination with your
local analytics’ referral traffic report to determine
where your prospective customers might be cross-
shopping and establish your full competitive set.

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Figure 1: Compete PRO Traffic Dashboard
Step 1:FindYour Potential Customers
WhenThey’re in Buying Mode
By identifying when your customers are most
likely to buy, you can better understand consumer
behavior as a whole and make more informed
decisions about your online marketing as it relates
to ecommerce. Because new and returning
customers will be buying from you directly, online,
you should focus your marketing efforts on
websites they’re visiting throughout their paths-to-
purchase.
Since you’ve already identified which of your
competitors are using ecommerce to sell their
products and which aren’t, you’ll now need to
analyze from where those competitors are receiving
their traffic. Using Compete PRO’s Incoming Sites
feature, you can get a good feel for types of sites
your potential customers are visiting before they
buy. This knowledge is invaluable as you plan your
content and advertising strategies and research
deeper into reasons why your competitors are
getting traffic from the sites they do.

4. 33
As you’re conducting your investigation, make
note of any specific trends in the types of sites
that are driving traffic to your competitors. Once
you’ve gathered a list of top traffic sources, you’ll
need to understand why those sites are sending
traffic. Explore the sites on your list and think
about them in terms of your competition – look for
advertisements, affiliate links, partnerships, etc.
If, for example, ecommerce businesses in your
industry primarily sell products that they don’t
directly manufacture or create, take a look at
shopping behavior. Are potential customers visiting
product pages on the manufacturers’ sites before
visiting you or your competitors?
If so, this could be a sign that you and/or your
competitors aren’t providing enough product
information, or that consumers are searching for
manufacturer coupons. Additionally, looking for
coupon or bargain sites in incoming traffic reports
is a good way to identify potential partnerships or
other opportunities that aren’t yet being thoroughly
leveraged by your competitors.

5. Figure 4: Compete PRO Outgoing Traffic Feature
44
Step 2:Anticipate Holes inYour Sales Funnel
to Capture Lost Conversions
4
Now that you have a better understanding of where
your customers are going when in buying mode,
you can look at trends in outgoing traffic to find
out which websites you and other players in your
industry are losing traffic to. For example, if most
of your industry’s lost traffic is going to the largest
player in the market, it’s important to understand
why that is. Do they have a better price point?
Is their site easier to navigate? Maybe they have a
better ratings system or product reviews. Because
you know that these customers visited your website
or others before the largest player’s, you can infer
that the reason for their success is more than just
their brand. They’re doing something better. Find
out what that “something” is and do it even better.

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When looking specifically at lost traffic from yours
or your competitors’ ecommerce sites to other sites
in your industry, you’ll want to understand, in detail,
why the traffic is being lost. Are shoppers looking
for a brick and mortar option? Are they leaving
because they can’t find what they’re looking for?
Is another checkout process more effective? Why?
These are the questions you’ll need to ask yourself
as you step outside of your competitive intelligence
tool and into your off-site research.
Just as in the previous step, it’s also important to
look at relevant sites that don’t offer an ecommerce
option. Looking at outgoing traffic reports for the
non-ecommerce sites can help you validate your
own decision to join the ecommerce space. How
much of their traffic is lost to competitors that do
have ecommerce options?
Step 3:BenchmarkAgainstYour Competitors
Now that you’ve done your research and
investigated your competitors’ ecommerce
strategies, you’ll need to stay up-to-date on
the latest trends in your industry. By regularly
benchmarking yourself against your competitors
using competitive intelligence data, you can
easily identify traffic that you’re losing to your
competitors and keep your program optimized over
time. As with any business strategy or marketing
campaign, your ecommerce platform needs
constant improvement to compete. Again, you can
monitor this data with the Outgoing Traffic feature in
Compete PRO.
The most efficient way to keep tabs on your
outgoing traffic as well as your competitors’ is
to use the Saved Groups or Custom Category
features in Compete PRO. Creating a group of the
sites in your competitive set allows you to easily
compare the referral traffic metrics that you care
about and track them over time. Additionally, you
can opt to receive monthly email alerts highlighting
changes in the data for the sites in your Saved
Groups. Regularly monitoring your competitors can
be made even easier with custom-built monthly
dashboards, showcasing how you can capitalize on
the weaknesses of your competitors. Once you’ve
got your outgoing traffic baseline established from
current metrics, it will be easier for you to follow
yours and your competitors’ progress and find
possible improvements on your end that can give
you a competitive edge.

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About Compete
Compete, a Kantar Media company, helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online
behavior of millions of consumers. Leading advertisers, agencies and publishers rely on Compete’s products
and services to create engaging online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns. Compete’s
online panel—the largest in the industry—makes the web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people’s lives.
Compete PRO, Compete’s syndicated offering, is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines
site, search and referral analytics in a single product and user interface to help you outperform the competition
and increase online marketing ROI.
For more information please contact pro@compete.com or 866-633-8390.
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