Evaluating business and marketing performance is harder than you might think. Internal data can only reveal so much, while benchmarks – industry and competitive – can unveil much more than your own historical data.<\/p>\n
Internal performance indicators can show a twofold traffic growth and an inflow of customers from new channels compared to similar periods year-over-year (YoY), yet the market or your competitors might be moving at a much faster pace. And if that is the case, you should always be aware of it to maintain a competitive edge within the market.<\/p>\n
This post will guide you through the process of gaining insights into your performance level within the industry to help you focus on further improvements and be able to set more relevant goals.<\/p>\n
Competitive benchmarking is the process of comparing your company metrics against competitors and the overall market. Essentially, it is a method that helps businesses evaluate their performance, pinpoint best industry practices, and initiate their adoption to keep an edge over the competition.<\/p>\n
In digital marketing terms (this is what we\u2019re covering here), the purpose of competitive benchmarking is to amplify digital marketing strategies and tactics based on insights from competitors. Yet there is a fine line between competitive benchmarking and\u00a0competitor analysis<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although similar in approach, competitive benchmarking and competitor analysis serve two distinct purposes:<\/p>\n Automated Competitive Benchmarking<\/p>\n with Kompyte by Semrush<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By benchmarking yourself against the industry and competitors, you will be able to get a clearer understanding of your market position and to uncover potential opportunities.<\/p>\n Essentially, there are three types of competitive benchmarking and, hence, three ways businesses can gain market advantage from adopting this method:<\/p>\n This post will be focusing on performance benchmarking, and will define what metrics you will be looking at and what steps you should take to perform this type of competitive benchmarking.<\/p>\n Before getting started with competitive benchmarking, and even before identifying the competitors you are comparing your performance against, you have to think carefully about what metrics you are considering.<\/p>\n Based on goals and key performance indicators (KPIs), keep your metrics quite simple to be able to look at them over time:<\/p>\n #1 KPI: Growth assessment:<\/strong>\u00a0site traffic numbers will help you benchmark your growth rate against the competition.<\/p>\n #2 KPI: Ranking improvements:<\/strong>\u00a0to evaluate ranking wins, look at competitors\u2019 traffic in terms of keywords and top landing pages.<\/p>\n #3 KPI: Social media reach:<\/strong>\u00a0from follower count and engagement metrics to how much traffic social media brings to the site, look at your competitors\u2019 social media indicators to assess your social media improvements.<\/p>\n #4 KPI: Brand awareness and share of voice:<\/strong>\u00a0in the digital realm, brand awareness is measured by direct traffic numbers, while the share of voice can be evaluated by looking at the share of traffic from the overall market traffic counts.<\/p>\n #5 KPI: Product success:<\/strong>\u00a0by looking at competitors\u2019 top visited pages, you can build assumptions on the most popular products and services they are offering and use these insights to adjust your own product roadmaps and offerings.<\/p>\n #6 KPI: Share of Search \/ Share of SERPs:<\/strong>\u00a0look at where your competitors are mentioned (and you\u2019re not) on the pages that rank for your commercial keywords. Tip:\u00a0Surround Sound<\/a>\u00a0makes this easy.<\/p>\n Once you\u2019ve identified what metrics you should be looking into, you can finally get started with competitive benchmarking.<\/p>\n In keeping with our step-by-step explanation, we’ll show you how this process can be fulfilled for the digital media industry.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what the competitive landscape within the digital media industry looks like:<\/p>\n With the ongoing race towards digitalizing the more traditional print media industry, a media brand like USA Today makes it to the top 10 digital media brands and seems to be doing pretty well.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Traffic Analytics tool<\/a>\u00a0reveals that digital performance-wise, USA Today has seen some ongoing improvements over the last two years:<\/p>\n Yet competitive benchmarking will uncover whether the brand\u2019s growth is in line with the industry\u2019s growth rate and identify gaps in USA Today\u2019s own performance.<\/p>\n Any competitive benchmarking starts with identifying the most relevant competitors for the comparison.<\/p>\n You might have an idea of who your top industry competitors are, or which ones stand closer to you. But you have to choose whether you want to:<\/p>\n It can be challenging to pinpoint the most relevant pool of competitors to benchmark your performance against, but tools like\u00a0Market Explorer<\/a>\u00a0can do the job for you.<\/p>\n Based on common site categories and audience interests, the tool gives us an overview of USA Today\u2019s competitive landscape:<\/p>\n This tool provides a high-level view of industry competitors, which is what you need for competitive benchmarking, but\u00a0this post<\/a>\u00a0will guide you through a more detailed approach to identifying your rivals.<\/p>\n Once you\u2019ve gained a thorough understanding of who you are comparing yourself against, you have to measure traffic trends within your industry and pinpoint growth potential based on competitors\u2019 site traffic data.<\/p>\n If for step 1 you could simply rely on some common sense and general industry knowledge, this step requires you to employ tools that are specifically designed for this on top of looking at your internal YoY growth numbers.<\/p>\n The very same Market Explorer tool reveals that the overall industry saw a big audience spike at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and though the trends has leveled out, numbers remain high.<\/p>\n These insights into the overall industry trends show that USA Today can potentially capitalize on the rise of interest in and market growth of digital media, and needs to continue the competitive benchmarking process to dissect particular competitors\u2019 strategies.<\/p>\n Market Explorer also reveals the rate at which USA Today\u2019s competitors have grown within the past year – this is an important metric to look at to benchmark your own growth numbers against those of your rivals:<\/p>\n USA Today\u2019s traffic decreased YoY, much like almost every other newspaper since 2020. USA Today might take comfort in this, knowing that their slight decrease is likely fueled by a broad downward trend in the industry, instead of some mistake they’re making internally.<\/p>\n Likewise, for inspiration on how to thrive in the market post-covid, they might look to the few newspapers that did see an increase in visits, like BBC or the Daily Mail.<\/p>\n AI Powered Competitive Data Collection<\/p>\n with Kompyte by Semrush<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Seeing that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Daily Mail are the fastest-growing rivals for USA Today, we\u2019ll be looking into their particular traffic acquisition strategies to see where USA Today\u2019s weaknesses and opportunities are.<\/p>\n Tools like Market Explorer can provide a helicopter view of where competitors\u2019 are placing their bets regarding traffic in comparison with the overall market benchmarks.<\/p>\n This is how USA Today\u2019s traffic breakdown looks against the key rivals we identified in the previous step:<\/p>\n The overall traffic trend is pretty consistent across all the media brands – direct and search traffic, or brand awareness and great SEO, are key channels that attract audiences to the digital media brands\u2019 sites.<\/p>\n We can spot that the Washington Post, the second-largest media site in terms of traffic, has a relatively high flow of traffic coming from social channels – so, USA Today could invest in a stronger social media presence with fewer brands to compete against.<\/p>\n Once you identify which channels you should invest in, make sure to go through\u00a0this post<\/a>\u00a0to find out surefire strategies that bring more traffic from all traffic channels – direct, search, paid, social, and referral.<\/p>\n What you can also benchmark yourself against are your competitors\u2019 products and offerings.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s challenging to uncover which products really seal the deal for competitors\u2019 success, you can gather some insights on the key audience magnets with regard to products by looking at the top pages of your rivals\u2019 sites.<\/p>\n If these pages are seeing the largest shares of competitors\u2019 traffic, it means they generate the highest audience interest and attract the biggest optimization or advertising efforts.<\/p>\n As the Traffic Analytics tool indicates, the main pages are almost always the most visited pages across all of USA Today\u2019s competitors\u2019 sites. However, if we look at the top five pages for NYT and WSJ, for instance, we can see that interactive\u00a0coronavirus-dedicated pages<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0games<\/a>\u00a0attract incredible audience numbers for the two brands.<\/p>\n Thus, USA Today can take some of the most popular \u201cproducts\u201d of the competing brands and see if it can integrate similar offerings and products within its own online publication.<\/p>\n Competitive benchmarking should be an ongoing process, as industry trends and competitors\u2019 performance keep changing every year, quarter, and even month.<\/p>\nThe difference between competitive benchmarking and competitor analysis<\/h3>\n
\n
Why Do Businesses Use Competitive Benchmarking?<\/h2>\n
\n
What Metrics to Look At for Competitive Benchmarking?<\/h2>\n
What Does the Competitive Benchmarking Process Look Like?<\/h2>\n
Step 1: Choose Relevant Competitors to Benchmark Against<\/h3>\n
\n
Step 2: Look at Industry Trends and Growth Potential<\/h3>\n
Step 3: Analyze Competitors\u2019 Traffic Sources (Channels)<\/h3>\n
Step 4: Find and Benchmark Your Competitors\u2019 Top Products\/Services<\/h3>\n
Using Competitive Benchmarks to Optimize Your Business and Marketing Strategy<\/h2>\n