Visualising competitor PPC and SEO activity for MarketQuarter
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
May 19, 2010 [836 views]
I am trying to improve my experimental shop Market Quarter (buy French food including duck confit, snails and fresh foie gras) through visualising data using the wide variety of tools available online.
Today’s task was to use SpyFu’s Kombat tool to look at my competitors to get a sense of scale for their SEO and PPC activities.
I used the list of competitors I had assembled from the last exercise. There are somewhere between 15-20 of them; strict criteria for competitors turns out to be surprisingly difficult. I was looking for UK companies who sell what I sell and who are also perhaps big enough to produce insights that would improve my site.
Kombat lets me compare Market Quarter with 2 competitors at a time. I am sure that I could have found a numerical tool that would have compared them all at once (and indeed will try out other tools as this projects evolves) but I wanted to create some more pictures to be used to illustrate the stories.
I entered each pair of competitors and took snapshots of the resulting venn diagrams before assembling them and scaling them into a two composite images: one for PPC and one for SEO. In each case the aim was to show activity (size) and the overlap (where we compete).
Each image also reveals competition between selected pairs of competitors and of course this is not necessarily competition with me: two companies could rate highly in SEO for haggis which I do not sell. A more exhaustive overlap analysis would compare every competitor against every other but this was beyond the scope of today.
PPC activity
The first image (above) is useful in showing the relative spend by some of the big players in the food market including Natoora, eFoodies and Fortnum & Masons. The overlapping areas with the MarketQuarter suggest opportunities to locate additional products we might sell or promote differently.
Perhaps this sort of diagram will be useful in convincing clients that they should consider their competitors’ spending when planning their SEO activities,
SEO activity
The second image is perhaps more interesting as it reveals the relative importance (in terms of visability of each of the brands; some of which are virtually invisible. Notice the relative size of eFoodies in each image who are clearly focussing on PPC to build their business.
Conclusions
Visualisations such as this are useful as they can reveal patterns and pictures more easily than numbers but turning these specific pictures into actions is not straightforward. I cannot expect to achieve the reputation or have the ad spend of Fortnums but perhaps I can use other tools to see what the best of these stores is doing to achieve its higher visibility,
What is this project about?
Read the introduction to this series Site Benchmarking, testing and improvement for the MarketQuarter
I would love to hear from others who have performed similar analysis on their own shops or from anyone with questions. Add your comments below or follow @JonathanBriggs on Twitter
What do you think?
