Benchmarking competitors’ websites

 Benchmarking competitors websites

Benchmarking of competitors’ websites is vital in positioning a website to compete effectively with competitors that already have websites. Given the importance of this activity, criteria for performing benchmarking have been describe.

Benchmarking should not only be based on the obvious tangible features of a website such as its ease of use and the impact of its design. 

Benchmarking criteria should include those that define the companies marketing performance in the industry and those that are specific to web marketing as follows:

● Financial performance (available from About Us, investor relations and electronic copies of company reports) this information is also available from intermediary sites such as finance information or share dealing sites such as Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com) for major quoted companies.

● Conversion efficiency – sites can be compared to published results of average conversion rates (see, for example, SmartInsights.com).

● Marketplace performance – market share and sales trends and, significantly, the proportion of sales achieved through the Internet. This may not be available directly on the website, but may need the use of other online sources. For example, new entrant to European aviation easyJet (www.easyjet.com) achieved over two-thirds of its sales via the website and competitors needed to respond to this.

● Business and revenue models (see Chapter 5) – do these differ from other marketplace players?

● Marketplace positioning – the elements of the marketing mix covered in the including Product, Pricing and Place.

● Marketing communications techniques – is the customer value proposition of the site clear? Does the site support all stages of the buying decision from customers who are unfamiliar with the company through to existing customers? Are special promotions used on a monthly or periodic basis? Beyond the competitor’s site, how do they pro-mote their site? How do they make thorough use of intermediary sites to promote and deliver their services?

● Services offered – what is offered beyond brochureware? Is online purchase possible? What is the level of online customer support and how much technical information is available?

● Implementation of services – these are the practical features of site design that are described in this chapter, such as aesthetics, ease of use, personalisation, navigation, availability and speed.

A review of corporate websites suggests that, for most companies, the type of information that can be included on a website will be fairly similar. 

Many commentators make the point that some sites miss out the basic information that someone who is unfamiliar with a company may want to know.

Such as:

● Who are you? ‘About Us’ is now a standard menu option.

● What do you do? What products or services are available?

● Where do you do it? Are the products and services available internationally?

● What makes you different? Why should I use your site/services compared to your competitors’? This includes communicating the online value proposition.

Designing the information architecture Rosenfeld and Morville (2002) emphasised the importance of information architecture to an effective website design.

They said:

It is important to recognise that every information system, be it a book or an intranet, has an information architecture. ‘Well developed’ is the key here, as most sites don’t have a planned information architecture at all. They are analogous to buildings that weren’t architect in advance.
Design decisions reflect the personal biases of designers, the space doesn’t scale over time, technologies drive the design and not the other way around.

In their book, which is still the basis for good practice in web design, Rosenfeld and Morville (2002) give these alternative definitions of an information architecture:

1 The combination of organisation, labelling and navigation schemes within an information system.

2 The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content.

3 The art and science of structuring and classifying websites and intranets to help people find and manage information.

4 An emerging discipline and community of practice focussed on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

In practice, information architecture involves creating a plan to group information logically it involves creating a site structure which is often represented as a site map.

A well-developed information architecture is very important to usability since it determines navigation options and findability (Morville, 2005). The research to improve findability and in particular through optimising on-site search engines can yield major benefits to site owners. A planned information architecture is essential to large-scale websites such as transactional e-commerce sites, media owner sites and relationship-building sites that include a large volume of product or support documentation Information architectures are less.