Experian offers similar psychographic data over here and I’m about to look into how that could be tied to Web usage data.

Jacques: I am glad you found the post helpful. In response to your questions:

Suggestions 1 & 2: A bit puzzled here; this assumes that you would have access to the competitor’s data, which is highly unusual…

That is exactly what you get with HitWise or ComScore (please see my other post about important differences in how each company collects data).

Once you have access to the tool you simply punch in any website url and you can do #1 or #2. The only care I would apply would be for really small sites, they might not have enough data in either tool.

Tip 2: Wait! you’re saying Clicktracks can tell me the downstreams?? How? I guess you are talking about Hitwise capability here, right?

If you have links on your site that take people to other sites then ClickTracks will help you measure those site exits (without needing things like internal redirects etc).

A competitive analysis tool will tell you where people go next regardless of if you have have links to other sites. So you can find out how many people go from microsoft.com to google.com easily. That is what I mean by downstream.

Tip 7: yeah, pretty sexy. However, I am afraid that it is rather US centric (as a Canadian, I tend to notice ;) ),

Hmmm I am not a native US resident and I always thought Canada was the 51st state! Just kidding, honestly. : )

You are right in your observation. But it would not surprise me if PRIZM covers canada, I am not sure though. Of course other countries in the world are still out of reach.

For international I would recommend HitWise for other things because they have a huge international sample set (almost 18 million).

Thanks so much for taking time to comment.

There are also some web analytics providers offering some level of CI or benchmarking, which would help with your second “Do NOT”. However, I had never heard of anything like the upstream/downstream. I have had alot of clients ask, “where do they go next?” Wondering if they are shopping around, for instance.

As always, thanks so much for these posts!

I’m glad to see your enthusiasm about CI, because I am also a big believer that this should/will be an important part of the Web Analyst’s portfolio of techniques in the near future.

A few questions/comments:

Suggestions 1 & 2: A bit puzzled here; this assumes that you would have access to the competitor’s data, which is highly unsual…

Tip 1: Isn’t it neat!!

Tip 2: Wait! you’re saying Clicktracks can tell me the downstreams?? How? I guess you are talking about Hitwise capability here, right?

Tips 3, 4 & 5: Any company investing a lot in SEM gets a good reason to purchase CI applications right there!

Tip 7: yeah, pretty sexy. However, I am afraid that it is rather US centric (as a Canadian, I tend to notice ;) ), whereas, as we all know, the Web is borderless (well, simply put). A web site with a large portion of its traffic coming from areas not covered by PRIZM would have some distortion in the portrait. But, still, this is very interesting stuff.

Avinash Kaushik has a pretty deep post on Competitive Analysis on his blog - he mentioned to me by email last night that he was about to post his most deep post on this subject.  And the Competitive Analysis information……

http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2006/08/competitive_intelligence_analy_1.html

One of things I want to directly comment on is point “4) Share of Brand and Category Key Phrases: Now you are cooking. Start with brand key phrases because they are most of your search traffic any ways”

The couple of Architectual House Plan clients (current and former) that I have worked with seem to exhibit the same search behavior. Most of the search traffic does, indeed, come from the Architect’s name or brand, but so do the conversions! While I have put great effort to get rankings for my Oregon architect for carriage house plans, craftsman house plans, and for house plans, home plans, floor plans for my current and former clients in this sector, - a look at KeywordMax which I had installed in both cases, showed that most of the time, the keywords that led to a conversion were on the architects own name!

Well, that’s a problem if we’re trying to sell Search Services to increase traffic for “house plans”, “home plans” and “floor plans” if those terms don’t actually lead to a sale.

That’s what lead me to comment. Your right, you can’t for example, compare a Dell Server page vs. and IBM Server page vs. a HP Server page and say that one conversion rate is better than the other becasue the business strategy is so different (even if it seems like they are all direct competitors).

A couple of years ago you might say that Dell and IBM were direct competitors but lately it was Bill Gates who was saying that Google was not its’ direct competitor - IBM is Microsoft’s direct competitor.

The Claritas Geo-Demographics is something I’ve known about and studied for over 5 years. The ability to co-relate a search query to a Geo-Demographic cluster segment (with age/sex data included) is exteremly complex and no one is doing it perfectly yet.

Finally, I get the feeling with Competitive Analysis - that is should be grounded in reality - that you should try to use the HitWise tools to explain why people do what they do (as much as you can) and compare it with what the competitors are doing on their site (again, if you have the access to the data and you can do it).

One thing to add about HitWise. You know your percentage of Search Traffic at Intuit - but do you know your competitors’s share? Probably not. IBM does not want to tell people what it’s traffic is - neither does Dell, HP or, for the most part, anyone else.

But, with HitWise, you can sorta reverse engineer and figure out your competitors share of search traffic, even if HitWise’s numbers for your own site are off (they were for ..you know who…). Once you work out the ratios, you can get a fairly good idea of what each competitors search traffic really is as well as what terms are actually working for them….that’s where the competitive search strategy begins.