Site benchmarking, testing and improvement for the MarketQuarter

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

May 16, 2010 [6925 views]

Today I start a project to look at improving my experimental business the MarketQuarter: a shop to buy French food, cheese, wine, classic dishes, duck confit, snails and foie gras online.

I am going to explore a set of activities to measure MarketQuarter against its competitors, test its effectiveness and identify opportunities for improvement. This could form a model for the analysis and testing of other sites. One aim is to find convincing visualisations of competitor activities using widely available tools.

I am going to do this project in public over several months and would value comment and suggestions from others.

Here is my first pass at the steps I will need to go through:

Find competitors with Spyfu and other tools
Get standard performance data and insights for MQ and competitors
Visualise some of this data to reveal opportunities
Define KPIs
See how far analytics is able to measure KPIs, modifying reporting or tracking as needed
Combine with other user insights such as Crazyegg, user feedback or Userfly
Define new types of social activity including blogging, Twitter and Facebook
Locate opportunities for generating in-bound links including perhaps TextAds
Define effectiveness of current advertising spend using PPC
Experiment with A/B testing of the most visited parts of the site

This list already suggests a lot of actions and these will clearly need to be taken as a second step in the improvement process.

Questions I would like to answer

Are the competitors doing better than I am? In what way?
What specifically can I copy from my competitors in order to catch up with them?
How much of the demand for my products is being met by my site?
What are the most cost-effective interventions? Where should I be spending my time?
On what figures and measurements should I focus?

I am sure that other questions will emerge as the process continues and indeed may find myself diverted by some of the early answers. I will report those answers here as they happen.

I will try and be as open as possible during the process publishing links to tools as I find them or use them together with sample results. Of course I won’t want to reveal all the detail as this would simply provide fuel for my competitors but you should be able to copy the process if you read between the lines.

Read the next part of this series Finding ecommerce competitors: SEMrush and SpyFu compared

Recent comments:

On May 18, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Gerald wrote:

Hi Jonathan,

This is a really interesting project. I set up www.WatchMeGo.co.uk six months ago to learn some basics on e-commerce (and sell vintage, retro and fashion watches!). It's going well but there's lots more to do and I'll be watching your progress with interest.

Thanks,
Gerald

www.WatchMeGo.co.uk

On May 21, 2010 at 8:19 AM, David W. Aguilar wrote:

Hello Jonathan, My name is David W. Aguilar and have switched from the Spa Industry to eCommerce. It is a whole different ball game from the service side. When I initially set up Touch Spa eStore a month ago, I thought is was going to be a total breeze. But after getting into the system, you should definitely be knowledgeable about the technical aspect as well. I am currently studying SEO for beginners thru SEOmoz and find it quite helpful. I stumbled upon your project and very interested in the outcome as well. Since I am a newbie to this side of things, would you have any further suggestions or recommendations for me?

http://www.touchspa.com

Jonathan replies: Engaging with blogs (and leaving a link behind) is definitely a good strategy. I hope you find the rest of the series interesting. My advice in order of importance is:

1. Content 2. Titles + URLs 3. Page Structure 4. Inbound Links 5. META tags