The astronomical growth of group buying websites such as Groupon and Livingsocial has been a major trend for 2010 – but what does the group buying market look like beyond the hype?
This webinar will explore competitive intelligence and benchmarking as a way to understand what your competitors are doing online. Using popular group buying websites such as Groupon and Livingsocial as a case study, the webinar will use Compete’s Online Channel Effectiveness (OCE) product to show how marketers can gain insights and competitive benchmarks to improve their performance across the entire online sales funnel.
You can find presenter Damian Roskill on Twitter @droskill or connect with him on LinkedIn here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/droskill
4 Keys to Maximizing Online Channel Effectiveness Using Competitive Intelligence
1. 4 keys to maximizing online channel effectiveness using competitive intelligence A look at group shopping and the value of competitive intelligence February 2011
2. Today’s presenters Damian Roskill, Managing Director, Marketing at Compete Jason Caine, Director, Retail practice at Compete
3. Webinar logistics Today’s webinar will be recorded. You will be emailed a link. Please enter your questions in the Questions box. We will answer as many as possible at the end. If you have technical difficulties, try loggingback in or use a different browser The Twitter hashtag for today’s webinar is #oce
19. Competitive intelligence is a key process that can be used to inform instrumental decisions you make. The better you understand your competitors the clearer perspective you have on your industry and audience as a whole. -- Joanna Lord — Director of Customer Acquisition & Engagement, SEOmoz
20. The online path to purchase Awareness Engagement Conversion Loyalty
22. Do you currently measure the online awareness of your website or brand vs. your rivals?
23. Measuring awareness vs. rivals – Key metrics Share of voice vs. your rivals Market growth vs. your rivals Identify how marketing campaigns and new product launches impact market share – Daily traffic and referrals Identify demographic & behavioral segments that over/under perform versus rivals Identify gaps in your search marketing strategy versus rivals Measure your social media engagement versus rivals Awareness
40. What do you think are the most important metrics for measuring engagement on website?
41. Measuring engagement vs. rivals – Key metrics Product-specific page views vs. rivals Penetration of consumer research tools, application/lead forms, store locator, and other purchase predictors across competitive set Measure engagement across similar retail categories including microsites, community sites, etc. On-site engagement vs. rivals (time and page views) Engagement
42.
43.
44. What is the average conversion rate for your website?
45. Measuring conversion vs. rivals – Key metrics Shopping cart abandonment rates vs. rivals and “best practice” Cross-selling metrics Impact of online investments on off-line sales Conversion rate vs. rivals and “best practice” Conversion
Hello and welcome to our webinar “4 keys to maximizing online channel effectiveness using competitive intelligence.”This webinar will explore competitive intelligence and benchmarking as a way to improve the effectiveness of an online channel.
Today, we’ll have two presenters. My name is Damian Roskill and I am the Managing Director of Marketing here at Compete. I’ll be leading the webinar.Our supporting presenter today is Jason Caine. Jason is a Director at our Retailpractice here at Compete.Jason will walk us through specific examples that highlight how competitive intelligence is being leveraged by Compete’s retail and consumer products clients to increase their marketing effectiveness across the online funnel.
But before we begin, some webinar logistics.Today’s webinar will be recorded – we’ll email a link to the recording after the webinar.If you have any questions during the webinar, please enter them into the questions box on the right. We’ll work through all the questions at the end of the webinar and try and answer as many as we can.If you’re having technical difficulties viewing the webinar, try using a different browser such as Firefox.Finally, we’ll be tweeting during the presentation, so, as a reminder, the Twitter hashtag for today’s webinar is #oce.
Let me also take a minute to give a little background on Compete.Compete is a leading provider of marketing effectiveness products and services. We help marketers measure advertising and promotional effectiveness, website effectiveness, search marketing and competitive benchmarking.We do this by leveraging a panel of over 2 million US consumers to give marketers insight into consumer behavior.Compete combines these products with industry specific expertise to offer our clients insights tailored to their industry and needs.Compete is part of Kantar Media, a subsidiary of WPP – which enables us to offer our clients a holistic view of consumers by leveraging other companies in the Kantar family such as Kantar Retail and Dynamic logic.
Here’s an outline of our agenda today – we’ll be reviewing these four key areas in the sales funnel, and we’ll do it in the context of a case study on Groupon and Livingsocial.We’ll start with a brief overview of competitive intelligences and the sales funnel, and then we’ll step through the 4 keys to maximizing your online effectiveness: measuring awareness, measuring engagement, measuring conversion and measuring loyalty – and we’ll look at specific metrics in each part of the funnel.We’re going to try and get through the webinar as quickly as possible in order to take as many questions as we can.
Many of you on the webinar likely know us for our product Compete PRO – our syndicated competitive intelligence and benchmarking tool.Compete PROis used by thousands of marketers to monitor, benchmark, and discover new online marketing opportunities. But many of you may not be aware that Compete has other products. Thoughout the presentation today we’re going to go use insights from one of our other products, Online Channel Effectiveness, or OCE.OCE is a competitive intelligence and benchmarking tool customized to the specific client – it’s designed to help marketers answer very specific questions about their performance against their competitors.I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the product, but if you want more information about OCE, please feel free to reach out to Jason or myself after the webinar.
I wanted to start by talking about what we view as one of the central challenges that online marketers face today.At the highest level, the challenge is that while online marketers know how their website doing, they lack a view of their website in the context of the overall market.Marketers have excellent metrics to tell them about their website performance. Using tools such as Google Analytics or OmnitureSiteCatalyst, they can get a real-time view of how their website is performing across a host of metrics.However, marketers can only get internal measures of the performance of their websites. For example, you may know how your unique visitors change month-to-month, but how can you measure your share of voice across your entire market segment?What’s lacking for many marketers is the competitive landscape and metrics on market share that these tools simply can’t provide.
I think Joanna does a great job here of laying out why competitive intelligence is so important to running a business online. That is – that you need to make decisions based on data, and without that data you are essentially flying blind.As an example – imagine that your competitor decides to launch a new online tool, should you do the same? How can you assess the situation prior to making the costly investment to create a similar tool?
But what is also important to realize is that you can’t just think about competitive intelligence in terms of acquisition marketing.Marketers today need to measure their marketing effectiveness across the entire sales funnel, from awareness, to engagement, to conversion and, finally to loyalty.
Which brings us to our first key to maximizing your online channel: Measuring awareness or intent vs. your rivals.
But before we get to the specifics of Key #1, I thought I’d throw out a question – do you currently measure the online awareness of your website vs. your rivals?
Ok – but what does it mean to measure your awareness vs. your rivals in real terms? Here are some key metrics that you should be measuring to maximize your online channel.Measure your market growth versus your rivals. Are you under or over-performing vs. rivals? How has that varied over time, including key times of the year?Identify how your marketing campaigns and the marketing campaigns of your rivals impact your market share. You also need to understand the impact of new product launches.Another key question for marketers is the demographic makeup of their website versus their competitors. Are you performing as well as your rivals in your key demographics?Search is more important than ever in terms of driving your sales funnel – but are your competitors more effective at driving leads from search? Which search channels are most important to your competitors?And finally, with the growing importance of social media, how effective are you at driving awareness from social media channels such as Twitter or Facebook vs. your rivals?
But let’s take a look at a concrete example of these kinds of measurements, and how a real online marketers uses them. For that, I’m going to hand the forum over to Jason for a detailed look at Livingsocial and Groupon.
Now let’s look at the second key – measuring the level of consumer engagement with your website vs. your rivals
But let me throw out another question to the webinar participants – what do you think are the most important metrics for measuring engagement on a website?Once again, use the voting section on the right side of the screen to register your vote and you’ll instantly see the results from you and other participants in the webinar.
Now let’s look at some metrics for measuring conversion vs. your rivals.The most obvious measurements for engagement are metrics like time spent on site and the number of page views. All of these are basically extensions of what you are getting from your web analytics package, but now with the additional of your rivals.But we could also look at product-specific page views – meaning, if you and your rivals are both selling the same product, how do your page views for that product compare to your rival?We can also look at the consumer tools your rivals offer to enhance engagement. Are they spending time with a product configurator, store locator, or other tools?Finally, we should measure engagement across all web properties – not just the main site but also areas such as microsite and community/forum websites.
Now let’s look at the second key – measuring the level of consumer engagement with your website vs. your rivals
But let me throw out another question to the webinar participants – what do you think are the most important metrics for measuring engagement on a website?Once again, use the voting section on the right side of the screen to register your vote and you’ll instantly see the results from you and other participants in the webinar.
So let’s look at some metrics for measuring conversion vs. your rivals.First, how does your conversion rate compare to your rivals? How does it compare to the best practices across all websites?Is your shopping cart abandonment rate higher or lower than your rivals? And again, how does it compare to the “best practices” across all websites?Is your competitor more or less successful at cross-selling metrics, including product bundling and product penetration?And finally, are you more or less successful than your competitor at driving offline sales based on your online investments?
But let’s take a look at a concrete example of these kinds of measurements, and how a real online marketers uses them. For that, I’m going to hand the forum over to Matt for a detailed case study.- Why, if group shopping has gone mainstream, has Living Social not seen a dip, and is even improving their conversion rate?
The last key we want to discuss here is about measuring loyalty. Too often online marketers don’t pay enough attention to maintaining consumer loyalty – and it is important to understand what you competitors are doing in this area.
But before we jump into the details of loyalty metrics, here’s another question for you – what percentage of your customers are repeat customers?Use the voting section on the right side of the screen to register your vote and you’ll instantly see the results from you and other participants in the webinar.
Very interesting results – clearly loyalty is important to all of you. But what are the metrics that we can use to judge loyalty?An obvious metric to look at is the percentage of repeat customers for you vs. your competitors. Are they better at bringing people back?You can look at the number of competitive sites that your customer visited prior to coming to your website.You can look at promotional sensitivity – are your customers just being driven by price? Are your competitors more aggressive at loyalty offers for existing customers?
#1 Measure awareness – you need to focus on both share of voice and acquisition marketing performance vs. your rivals. Acquisition marketers tend to focus on the acquisition side, but you need to look at both.#2 Measure engagement – remember that engagement can be defined many ways and the best marketers are measuring across all of them.#3 Measure conversion – remember to look at conversion vs. not just your rivals but against best practice. Also realize, if you’re selling offline the importance of connecting conversion back to online.#4 Measure loyalty – returning customers are only part of the equation – measuring, for instance, the number of competitors cross-shopped can indicate that your customers are only buying on price vs. experience.
Thank you – here’s our contact information – feel free to reach out to either Jason or myself with any questions or comments.
The last key we want to discuss here is about measuring loyalty. Too often online marketers don’t pay enough attention to maintaining consumer loyalty – and it is important to understand what you competitors are doing in this area.