When it comes to marketing, being able to compete with the best of them is incredibly important. Thankfully, we can get a great idea of how our competitors run their business with Traffic Analytics’ Top Pages report.
Here are 8 ways you can use the insights from this report to boost your strategies and outperform your competitors.
Competitors' Customers
What you can take away from this lesson: Among all of the top pages, you may be the most interested in those that have "cart," "basket," "pay," "trial," and "free trial" in their URLs
How Much Traffic Are They Generating?
Check your top-performing competitor to get an idea of your maximum possible reach. Gain some insights to determine if their audiences were engaged in a particular piece of content on the website.
What Traffic Sources Did They Use to Market a Similar Product or Service?
Take one of your digital competitors and analyze their traffic sources over time. This will help you see how they prioritize each channel, and provide you with inspiration for your own marketing campaigns.
Newly Added, Growing, and Declining Pages
Using the “Insights” section of the top pages report, you can uncover newly added pages, or older pages that are rapidly growing or declining in popularity. The tool allows you to filter by category and traffic type to narrow your analysis.
Tracking these pages can provide a variety of insights into your competitors' strategies, including:
New Products
Changes in pricing
Audience targeting shifts
Emerging or fading promo campaigns
You could visit these top pages yourself and see what structure, design, and CTAs your competitors used. This kind of research can inform your own campaigns and landing pages.
Analyzing the introduction of new pages along with their growth and decline over time can help you assess how your competitors are thinking about the market, responding to market trends, and pivoting as conditions change. This behind the scenes look can help inform your strategy looking toward the future.
Your Competitors’ Top Products or Services
Which of your competitors’ pages do you think generated the most traffic? Probably, those that devoured a big part of the marketing budget and initially contained the most exciting products or services for the target audience.
Pay attention to the top pages that represent your competitor’s specific products or product categories. Study what traffic sources your rival leverages. Then, consider adding similar pages to your own campaign, or, to the contrary, focus on promoting the rest of your product range. The latter case might be a reasonable strategy at times and won’t escalate competition.
Competitions' Sites and Partners’ Media Platforms
This insight will be exceptionally valuable for content strategists and SEO specialists. The list of top pages can alert you to what pages you could add to the structure of your website. Even more precisely, it can indicate which content you should focus on to generate and retain the most traffic.
Beginning broadly, look at the “Entrances” and “Exits” metrics associated with each of the top pages. These numbers can tell you which pages are bringing the most traffic to the site, and on which pages users exit the site.
Pages with high entrances indicate a clear appeal for users; they’ve entered the URL or followed a link to the page for a reason. Discrepancies in the numbers can also provide insights. For example, if a page only brings in a small number of visitors, but accounts for a large number of exits, it could point to potential issues with the page.
Now, you can look a bit closer by exploring the topics other websites bet on in their seasonal and regular campaigns and reveal what channels they use for their successful promotion. You can gain insights based on this data that will help you plan an even better campaign for your own site, whether it be for general brand awareness or conversions.
The more traffic you receive, the more ultimate target actions you may have.
If you search for blog-related URLs in the list of top pages, you will find out if and how your competitors invest in content creation and promotion. You may also find that this strategy isn't fruitful for your industry.
High-Priority Languages and Most Valuable Regional Markets
Even more detailed and find out the breakdown of traffic to your competitors’ top pages by country. Search for a URL that contains a country code. If a localized page or subdomain has made it to the global top, the named country is of great value to the business.
Once you’ve learned the number of unique visitors to this regional page, you can try to estimate the size of your competitor’s audience in this country. Then, analyze the traffic channels your competitors chose to promote each of these regional top pages.
Have a look at the example of Louis Vuitton and how their global audience impacts their business. The country codes highlighted in red represent the intended region for these pages
The Focus of Your Competitors’ Marketing Campaigns
After you have analyzed separate top pages inside and out, it is time to dig deeper. See if you can group these URLs under categories or detect any trends. For example, perhaps several product pages made it to the top of the list in a specific period; this could mean their product category was the focus of a marketing campaign at a particular point in time.
If a company provides several services, consistent clusters of same-type top pages will help you detect what the company is most known for. Zillow, for example, turns out to be more visited (and stronger promoted) for the purchase and sale of real estate, rather than listings for places to rent.
You may also find additional interesting trends by looking closely at campaigns. For example, it looks like Zillow’s rental campaigns bring much more traffic through referrals than their purchase pages. This kind of information can clue you into their strategy, and provide ideas for your own campaigns.
Changes in Consumer Strategy, Target Audience, and Product Range
After you have discovered a company’s key product or product category, see if they tend to change their strategy and positioning over time. Keep an eye on the fluctuation of traffic to the same-type pages. For example, car companies are beginning to release electronic options for their vehicles.
Ford’s most popular models used to be the F150 and the Mustang — like in May 2018, we see these models show up in their top pages:
Conclusion
As you can see through these 8 examples, the Top Pages report can reveal so much more than simple visits to a website. When the various aspects of the tool are cross examined, you can learn a great deal about competitor sales numbers, audience, products, and promotions. More broadly, you can get a sense of what trends consumers are excited about in the market.
Taking these insights, you can improve on your own traffic generation strategies and ensure your site’s pages are optimized for success.
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