How to do competitive product analysis? Share 8 tips!

I attended an event a few days ago and met the CEO of a friendly company.

Talking about business, I said:

The event you launched last week was pretty good; the number of participants was less than the first time, but the conversion rate was still good, and the ROI for the first investment should be above 1:12; you launched Public Account A, which I have been following for a long time, and the price should be 85,000, right? This number has more real traffic . You have also invested in the three public accounts of BCD. The user conversion rates are very high, but the retention rate in the later stage is estimated to be not high. And you have just launched some information flow advertising , right? The ROI is between 6-8 times, right? It’s quite expensive to open the information flow at the beginning, your family still has money!

Maybe everything I said came true. The CEO of the competitor turned green with anger and was thinking, "Is there a traitor in the company?"

Okay, let me clarify here, there is no traitor in your company; I obtained the information through public channels , through legal and compliant means, and came to this conclusion after cross-verification.

So, today we will talk about 5 conventional methods and 4 unconventional methods of competitor monitoring.

1. Why should we monitor competitors?

First of all, let’s set a flag: competitor monitoring is not to bring down competitors, nor to spy on competitors’ business secrets, but to anchor your own company’s position in competitor monitoring, learn from competitors’ advantages, and improve yourself.

The market is so big that it is impossible for one company to eat all the cakes, and common development is the only truth.

It is impossible for a company to walk with its head down all the time. It needs to occasionally look up at its competitors to see if it is moving too slowly or taking a detour.

Look at KFC and McDonald's . A stable and regular competitor is conducive to healthy competition, which is a positive thing for both themselves and the competitors.

In the world of Internet finance , there is no sense of competition, but more of cooperation with friendly companies.

One time I found that our brand word was bought by a certain company. I contacted its president on WeChat , and he readily purchased our brand word even though I had never met him before.

A competitive and cooperative environment will help the industry go further.

2. Identify competing products

There is no standard for identifying competitors, because in this market, it is very likely that any Internet financial company may become your competitor.

Generally speaking, we believe that a product is a competitor if it meets the following two conditions:

1. The product positioning is highly consistent; the products of Internet financial companies are roughly the same, but the target groups of the products may be segmented. You can find competitors that are similar to yours from the segmented groups.
2. Looking at the scale, only companies with almost the same scale can become competitors. Otherwise, BAT will be everyone's competitors.

3. Determine the competitive product form and corresponding monitoring tools

In addition to the PC official website, APP, mobile official website and official account, do competitors have mini programs ? Are there other SEO sites out there? After determining the competing products, use the corresponding monitoring tools to monitor them, as listed below:

4. Conventional methods for monitoring competing products

1. Official website monitoring

The official website monitoring of competitors is divided into internal official website monitoring and external official website monitoring.

1) Internal monitoring of the official website

Monitor changes in products, activities and services of competing PC/APP/official accounts.

After selecting the competitors, we will conduct an internal scan of the competitors' official websites every 15 days. The main purpose is to learn from the competitors' product design and activity forms.

This is the most common method of monitoring competitive products, but there are two more things to note:

1. Set up a record form and calculate the activity costs of competitors to evaluate the intensity of their activities. After accumulating for a period of time, you can roughly evaluate the intensity of competitors' marketing at different time points.
2. Restore the activity format of the competitor's product and determine the number of times the activity is reused. If the activity is reused more than 2 times, it means that the activity format is likely to be more effective. It is worthy of in-depth study and reference.

2) External monitoring of the official website

Mainly monitor the visits to the official website.

There are many such webmaster tools now, such as chinaz, Baidu Index, etc., which are similar and depend on personal habits.

Here we take Baidu Index as an example (Baidu Index is a reference value, and the internal algorithm has not been announced, so it cannot be used as a specific indicator reference; but you can set a relative indicator and look at the visits to the competitor's official website from the relative fluctuations of the data between competitors):

Usually I will set 3 competitive product words to represent 3 different competing products.

Without promotion , the search index intervals of the three competing products are relatively stable; if the curve of a competing product fluctuates as follows on a certain day or during a certain period of time, it means that the competing product has carried out some promotional activities. Then the next step is to use other methods, such as visiting the official website of competitors, searching for competitor words, consulting peers and channel competitor dynamics, cross-validating your judgment, and finding the reasons for the fluctuations in the competitor curve.

At the beginning, I said that the number of participants in the competitive product launch event was less than the first time, and the main basis was the Baidu Index.

The Baidu Index monitored for the first time was 80% higher than the Baidu Index monitored for the second time. Obviously, the number of participants was much smaller.

3) Another reverse application of Baidu Index is to judge the quality of competitor product delivery channels

We monitored that a competitor had deployed resources in travel channels several times in January and April. What were the results? Should we follow up? Baidu Index can help make judgments.

We found that compared with another competitor B, the Baidu search index of the competitor did not increase much after the promotion, which shows that the travel promotion actually had little effect on brand exposure. Looking at the Yangmaoqun channel again, media replenishment orders for this competitor's product have already appeared.

The cross-validation of Baidu Index and the wool group shows that the promotion activity did not achieve the expected results and our company does not need to follow up.

2. WeChat monitoring

Monitoring competitors’ public accounts is mainly done through keyword and competitor word searches, to monitor which public accounts competitors have placed ads on.

The correct monitoring posture is:

First, collect keywords of competitors, such as JD Card, Round A, state-owned enterprises, etc. These are keywords that must be promoted in the copywriting no matter how they change. Add competitor words, open Sogou search, and select the WeChat option.

Note: Do not open Baidu search, Baidu and WeChat are not familiar with each other .

It is best to search through WeChat on your mobile phone, which is more accurate than Sogou search. Some new articles can only be searched in the WeChat search bar on your mobile phone.

The copywriting content of competing products is ever-changing, and keywords should also be adjusted appropriately.

Currently, Internet finance companies have poured huge resources into the WeChat public accounts . Some Internet finance platforms have a monthly advertising volume of up to 3 million on WeChat public accounts, making it the most critical way to acquire customers.

Make a monitoring form and record the date of the competitor's launch, the number of article readings, the number of comments, and the number of likes. If there are two launches, it can be basically judged that the quality of the official account is high. Combined with other parameters, decide whether to follow up.

3. APP and mini program monitoring

When it comes to monitoring tools for competing apps, I usually choose Qimai Data, ASO 114 and iResearch Qianfan Index. There are also other analysis tools on the market, such as App Annie , Zen Master, and CoolChuan.

• Qimai data is mainly used to look at the ASO situation of competitors, especially the keyword coverage of competitors; refer to the keywords of competitors to optimize yourself.
• The Android market is quite chaotic and the data accuracy is not high, so just take a look. I usually choose ASO114 to monitor the Android market situation of competitors.
• The iResearch Qianfan Index can record changes in the operational capabilities of competing apps and is used to determine the activity of the apps after the competing products are launched.
• The mini program is mainly for Aladdin data monitoring. Generally speaking, the monitoring data here is very general and can be used for reference only.

V. Other unconventional monitoring methods

1. Wool channel

The wool channel is the best auxiliary tool to monitor the quality of competitor product promotion.

The competitor has placed ads on a certain WeChat public account twice, which means that the public account is likely to be effective. However, it has to pass a series of verifications, one of which is to search for the competitor's words in the wool group.

If the wool group releases media to increase the volume, disguise yourself as a novice wool party and further obtain the registration link for the media replenishment (the reason for disguising yourself as a novice wool party is to consult more information from the wool party promoters). Today's media replenishment orders are rather obscure, but there are traces to follow. By guessing based on the name of the media or the media company, you can usually get it right.

The reason why I said at the beginning of the article that some of the official accounts of competitors have high conversion rates is because I found media replenishment in the wool channels. With wool replenishment, the conversion rate must be high!

2. Data shared by distributors and service providers

The channel partners mentioned here refer to all media, advertisers and channels that provide traffic to competing products.

Normally, channel operators are always willing to share historical data on competitor products with you so that you can also place products on that channel. Of course, what the channel dealers say is exaggerated in most cases, so you just need to listen to it; the data performance is definitely not as good as what the channel dealers say, but it can give you a side view of the launch dynamics and budget situation of competing products.

The official account and price of a certain company that I mentioned at the beginning of the article were learned from its service provider.

I also know the ROI of the company's investment because I found that there is such media replenishment in the wool group, requiring an ROI of 1:20, and when it is shared with the media costs, it is estimated to be around 1:12. Since it is media replenishment, I said that the conversion effect in the early stage is not bad, but the retention rate is not expected to be high in the later stage.

In addition to this type of channel providers, there are also supporting service providers, such as electronic certificate service providers, SMS channel service providers, and payment channel service providers. Through the consumption of their products, we can roughly infer more about competing products.

3. Learn about competing products through peers and BD groups

There is a competitive relationship between peers, and the value of the information gained from asking each other about the company's situation is definitely not high; but once they start talking about another peer company, everyone will tell you everything they know.

By joining a group to communicate and meet with peers, you can learn more about competitors.

4. Competitive product user feedback

Other ways include disguising yourself as a competitor’s user, entering competitor’s groups and forums, participating in higher-level activities of competitors, etc. to monitor competitors.

Let me reiterate one point here: the purpose of monitoring competitors is to learn from and improve yourself, not to steal competitors' trade secrets and bring down competitors - everyone must abide by this basic business ethics.

The above are 3 conventional methods and 4 unconventional methods of competitor monitoring: think about the purpose of competitor monitoring, determine the product form and monitoring tools of competitors, use conventional and extraordinary methods to regularly monitor competitors, better optimize yourself, and promote a good competitive and cooperative industry environment. This is the significance of competitor monitoring.

The author of this article @callan compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games