I really love performing competitor analysis for Ice Nine Online’s clients. It’s amazing how much publicly available information you can find about a company’s digital marketing tactics if you know where to look.
Competitor analysis is a great way to understand how various types of companies market themselves, which then allows you to “emulate” the really great ideas and avoid the obvious blunders.
It also requires combing through websites, online assets, social media pages, and marketing campaigns hyper-critically, which in turn leads to better website projects and campaigns for our clients.
Here are a few items I look at when doing competitor analysis:
- When the company last redesigned their website and what they changed
- How the company approaches calls-to-action across their various online properties
- What type of content and resources the company publishes
- Which social media networks the company is active on
- Fluctuations in the company’s Google rankings over time (matching this up to Google algorithm change timestamps can glean some very interesting insights)
- When the company started and stopped ad campaigns, who they were targeting, what was the offer, and then (very importantly) which campaigns they increased budget to
- What the company’s top sources of website traffic are
- Where the company gets their best backlinks and brand mentions from
Here are a few Amazon-specific competitor analysis items from Joshua Rawe, Co-Founder of eSpark, a top-rated Amazon Consulting Agency:
- Negative reviews on their listings. You can use these to improve your product and write compelling copy on your listing that shows your product’s superiority.
- Use a tool like Helium10 or JungleScout to view their monthly sales.
- Are they selling FBA or FBM? FBM is a missed opportunity for them and you will outsell them by utilizing it.
- What keywords their top products rank for. You can use Helium10 or JungleScout to find this information as well. Are there keywords you can target to capture market share?
- Where are they running ads? On what keywords and products?
- Use Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer tool to look at the top ranking products by keyword group. Can you compete on price and quality for that keyword?
Interested in having Ice Nine Online perform a competitor analysis for your company? Let me know.
About the Author
Share this Post
Comments
knowledgeable content
We are very grateful to you for this information and we hope that you will continue to give us such information.