Website Traffic/Performance Benchmarking & Audit

Growth of your website can best be measured by traffic benchmarking. It is the most definitive of such a metric. It should be noted, however, that a simplistic focus on pushing more traffic may end up defeating your business goals.

At Globibo Media, we help you understand traffic values. It is not limited to how many individuals visit your website. It is also not important as to how long they are staying on the site. To succeed, it is important that you understand what your audience wants in the first place.

You show know the answers to the following queries:

Is the correct target audience gets attracted by your marketing efforts?
What are the features defining your best customers?
How does the traffic you enjoy compare against industry leaders and competitors?
Is the site you own or administer is in tandem with the business aims?
Are you aware of best tactics to take away traffic from your competitors?

Fear not, answers to these questions are not hard to find. Our experts at Globibo Media are more than happy to help. With their help, you can enjoy a much better look at current visitors. If possible, you can align the strategy of traffic acquisition more intimately with the business goals.

Richer Website Traffic Metric

To comprehend overall traffic, you need a more intelligent iteration of the traffic within the industry. It must also be contrasted against the relevant competitors. It is possible that you could be tracking such metric staples like visits, time on site, return visits and uniques.

Total visits: This is the number of visitors to the site. It is inclusive of repeat visits.
Uniques: This is the number of non-repeated and unique visitors to the site
Return visitors: Number of visitors who are unique and who have also returned
Average visit time: Also called “time on site”. It is median amount of time which is spent by visitors on site

These statistics should be taken in context. You should see whether you are ahead of your competition or are you lagging behind. If your sales increase, it may mean your marketing efforts were a success. It can be that consumer shopping went up in the market.

The metric titled “share of visits” displays you the total visits percentage within the entire industry who come to your website. To give an example, McDonalds may benchmark the visits percentage they get within the food industry. This statistic will help them to identify whether a jump in traffic mirrors gains in relative standing- and not empirical fast food industry growth.

It will be an extremely wise move to benchmark the visits share against major competitors or the market's top brands. A chart made to reflect sales will throw up a wealth of information. For example, a well known fast food chain found that its sales actually become lower during the holiday season-and not higher as common sense may suggest.

Dig Deeper

Our experts at Globibo Media help you gain further insights from breaking down the audience data. The audience, as defined in this context, is the site's visitors. It is inclusive of audiences pushing traffic to competitors. Understanding the company's audience will assist it to comprehend whether it is actually competitive- or not. It could be that a certain age demographic could be flocking to competitor sites. A company then must adopt a few tactics to get these potential customers back into the fold.

Audience insights and market research must be used to comprehend demographics, attitudes, locations and behaviors of the competitor's audience.
If there is a shared audience, then the focus must be on converting and then engaging customers who are included in the shared group. To give an example, if 80 percent of such audience read Time magazine, then advertising spend can be done on the magazine to win the audience back.
The traffic sources should be analyzed and more money and time spent on them. For example, if a majority of the traffic is sourced from Facebook, then it follows that more money should be spent on it alone.

Important Factors to Note

There has been an evolution in traffic benchmarking. The days when celebration occurred with visitor increases or failure if it drops, are long gone. Fluctuations are caused by seasonality, trends, market changes and competitive standing. You should be conscious of the relevant traffic you get and if the traffic comes from the correct audience.

You should blend search, behavioral data, attitudinal data and clickstream. A blend of all these factors offer an effective insight into industry trends and also into the customer. You can also enjoy increased high value traffic.

Describing Competitor Benchmarking

The activity of competitor benchmarking offers insight into the inner workings of your competitor. It shows which activity works- and what does not. You can use such data to give advantage to yourself. These can be done through the adoption of successful practices. It can also be achieved through ineffective ones.

Benchmarking and Brands

Brands can take advantage of online benchmarking results through a number of ways. They can just take the option of putting in increased effort to a certain area where were rejected earlier. An alternative way is to adopt a few of the best practices used by the competition. These best practices must be implemented effectively into the existing business plan. Brands can also select to go the innovative route. They can attempt to create new strategy or tactic based on what was learned.

Benchmarking and Best Practices

Even though benchmarking must be included in the marketing plans for all brands, there are a number of issues to be aware of. The following must be taken with due caution:

Be transparent about the benchmarking process and the reason it is being executed. It is vital to have purpose and goal. Remember the efforts are going to cost both time and money.
Keep in mind that benchmarking is a continuous process. It is a not an one time job. It is possible to get sharp insights from an occasional work but the efficacy of competitor benchmarking is unsurpassed.
Wrong tools should not be used. Do not use cheap tools and unlimited number of free trials. Using inferior tools will result in you getting a part picture or an inferior one. It is not possible to extract reliable insights from such data. If done correctly, the benefits are much bigger than the cost.
Competitors are important. The list of competitors are not limited to selling similar products. Your online competitor also include the products or services which compete for attention from the same customer demographic. These are related to the topics and the content they show interest in. If you are analysing any paid channel, a number of brands bid for same traffic or keywords.

Traffic Measurement and Benchmarking

Website traffic comes from a total of three sources: organic, social and email. It is sufficient to say that all three sources can be improved. HubSpot to this effect has made a website where benchmarks across employee size, industry, business type and region are created. Report published by them exhibits proportion of the total visits and also median visits from every traffic source. The timeline is from January 2014 to May 2015.

B2B Websites Benchmarking for Sources of Traffic

B2B visitors: It is surprising to see both B2C and B2B companies having near identical profiles in the light of visits proportions from a number of other sources. Maximum visits were found to originate from direct and organic traffic. Referrals also have a major proportion. Email is surprisingly a low contributor-thus making it vital that email marketing campaigns need improvements.
Industries: Maximum ROI is generated from marketing services when it comes to email campaigns. It is logical if a majority of the B2B industries continue to under-perform. Even with successful email campaigns, it is imperative to have an expertise in your chosen industry.
Actual monthly numbers: It is clear that size is important in case of B2B marketing. It is to be mentioned that even if the numbers are lower than the industry standard, it may not be justified to make efforts on extracting increased traffic to the site. Examine the sales funnel shape and understand which stage of the funnel needs maximum work. There could be a possibility that fixing the leads problem leads you to attract greater number of visitors as well.

Best Benchmarking and Competitive Intelligence Tools

At the time of evaluation of Public Relations and marketing efforts, it is important to consider only two perspectives: trend of results and the results compared to closest competitors.

There are a broad range of analytics, monitoring and listening tools to answer trends of results. The second factor-comparing results to closest competitors- can be had by using any one of the many tools available. Comparisons can be made in terms of brand mentions in social media, organic search visibility, web traffic, target keywords and a number of other factors. The list of tools include:

Buzzsumo: It supplies competitive intelligence like what content gets more traction for competitors and the networks where they have achieved success. It also shows who is sharing content. The performance of content is compared across different companies. It can be extremely useful for social media monitoring, content curation, influencer outreach and content planning.
BuiltWith: Type in any URL and see details of technology utilized to make that website. You can also search the database of this tool to find out which sites utilize shopping carts, hosting and analytics. You can filter data by location, vertica. Traffic and other attributes.
Alexa: This offers visibility into traffic quality and sources to other websites
Serpstat: This intelligence tool is a simple one and shows how a company and its competitors perform both in organic and paid search on Google in multiple countries. You can use it to research on keywords too.
SimilarWeb: It allows you to benchmark the website and pits it against the competitors. You can then analyze your actual performance in terms of bounce rate, overall visits, time on site, and page views for evert visit. Having this tool is equal to enjoying acccess to the Google Analytics available for websites belonging to your competitor. The tool also offers SEO metrics and keywords for PPC. You can also go through visitor engagement and popular pages.
TalkWalker: You can monitor social media conversations and review them across a number of social networks. About 187 languages are covered and the numbers are growing. Search results can be grouped and filtered. You can benchmark brand against industry peers and also view a KPI range including follower growth, response rate and engagement rate.
com: You can use this tool to measure the digital results and discover business opportunities. Competition can be monitored and performance benchmarked.
Ispionage: PPC advertisers uses it as competitive intelligence tool. It helps brands for identifying competitors; both organic and paid keywords. It helps in identifying PPC spending levels landing or keyword or ad page groupings along with most profitable keywords.
TrackMaven: This tool provides insights into the performance of content not only for you, but your competitors across a number of important channels as well. These include social media, SEO, blogs, earned media, ads and email.
SpyOnWeb: Information is extracted from public sources and websites probably owned by the same owner are revealed. This tool identifies the IP address, Google Analytics ID and Google Adsense ID.
Rival IQ: This tool reveals how swiftly your competitors sweep up followers on the social networks and the frequency of their posts. It also shows the median engagement rate and the appearance of their most popular posts. It also offers competitive SEO metrics and also data on the paid search campaigns through adwords comparison spend. The latter is contrasted against other in the competitive landscape.
Spyranks: It helps in keyword research, rank tracking, competitive monitoring and backlink counts of all important websites in any segment of the market.