The benchmark allows you to locate your website against competing sites, identify your/their comparative advantages, and detect areas to work to improve the performance of your business. You have everything to gain by analysing the competing sites of yours. Do you want to compare the performance of your site to that of your competitors’ websites?
Want to know why and how your site or those of your competitors trust the first places in Google?
Do you want to identify the strategic axes and the most effective techniques to boost your activity on the web?
Read this complete guide! You will not regret it. Benchmarking your competitors’ websites can help you make giant strides in growing your business and nibbling away market share quickly. As long as you know how to do it. This is the purpose of this comprehensive guide.
The different types of website benchmarks
As mentioned in the introduction, the benchmark is a job that allows:
- Know where your website is relative to other sites – especially your competitors’ sites.
- Compare the performance of your website against the sites of your competitors.
- Identify your areas of weakness compared to your competitors with a view to continuous improvement.
- You can benchmark all the measurables related to your e-commerce activity and your lead generation process. Several elements can be benchmarked.
- Benchmark of competing sites: the main elements to analyse in e-commerce and Lead Generation business
Do you manage an e-commerce business or a B2B business of Lead Generation? Here are the main elements to benchmark to position you in relation to your competitors:
The loading time of the website. This is an essential element. Many studies have shown that a visitor starts to get upset when the page loading time is longer than two or three seconds. After 3 seconds, 40% of visitors decide to leave the site purely and simply. Improve the loading speed of the pages of your site is an essential axis to differentiate you from your competitors. On this subject, discover 9 techniques to improve the loading speed of your site.
The rebound rate. This indicator measures the proportion of visitors who visit more than one page of your website. If 80% of visitors who arrive on your website leave your site after visiting this page (without visiting other pages of your site, therefore), your bounce rate is 80%. The bounce rate makes it possible to evaluate the relevance and interest generated by your web pages. In e-commerce, in particular, the rebound rate makes it possible to measure the adequacy between on the one hand the expectations and needs of your visitors and the other by your offer, the quality of your content, etc. This is an important indicator for evaluating the qualitative performance of your website.
The bounce rate from your email marketing campaigns, which measures the traffic generated from your emailing campaigns. In other words: the proportion of recipients of your campaigns who click on the link in the email to access the landing page. The more your email campaign will be targeted and your email list quality, the lower the bounce rate will be
Lead Generation channels. This benchmark allows you to evaluate the share of each of your acquisition channels in your Marketing Lead Generation. Several studies have shown that emailing remains the most important acquisition channel, ahead of SEO and social networks. It’s important to identify your best-converting channels in order to allocate your marketing resources as efficiently as possible. On this topic, read our article “What attribution model to set up for your conversions? “.
The metrics on your web traffic, which show how well your website is attracting users. The total traffic of your website has a big impact on the bounce rate and the conversion rate. Measuring metrics on your web traffic allows you to compare your SEO, advertising, and inbound marketing performance against competing sites.
The sources of traffic acquisition, which teach you where the visitors to your website come from. How Lead Generation Channels, Traffic Acquisition sources can optimize your allocation in time and budget per channel. These metrics help improve the allocation of your resources based on the performance of each channel. This analysis also helps identify your audience’s favorite channels. The interest of following these metrics is also, as for all other benchmarks, to measure the evolution over time.
Conversion rates, which have a huge influence on the economic performance of your business. These indicators measure the effectiveness of your strategy and tactics by measuring the number of people who subscribe to your mailing list, the proportion of visitors to your website who turn into customers.
The abandoned basket rate, a key indicator in e-commerce, indicates the proportion of potential customers who add one or more products to their basket, start the purchase process and abandon it before finalizing their order. According to a Baymard study, the basket abandonment rate averages 68.81%. What is your rate? Which of your competitors? What are your margins for improvement? The aim of the benchmark of competing sites is to answer these questions.
The number of products per transaction is an excellent indicator to benchmark with the basket abandonment rate. Being able to both reduce the dropout rate and increase the number of products per basket is clearly a challenging goal. What is the average number of products per basket in your sector? This is an essential question to ask if you are in an e-commerce business.
These are just examples of a number of benchmarks to produce. There are many others to imagine, to realize. All you can measure, you can benchmark it. From there, the field of possibilities becomes immense. To start and do not scatter, we advise you to select the main KPIs of your site and benchmark them against the results obtained by the competing sites. This is also the main interest of KPIs: compare themselves to others. They allow to detect the points to improve but also, on the contrary, to highlight the points where you are really good. That’s why the benchmark is such an important activity. If you do not know where you stand compared to your competitors,
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