Spy on Competitors with Google Analytics
GOOGLE ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
I have a confession to make: I’ve only recently started using this trick. Sure, I’ve used GA and the Search Console for lead gen opportunities, but I never thought to use it to figure out which competitors visited a site— until now.
Like most digital analysts and marketers, I laughed when business owners and stakeholders asked if I could add Google Analytics to their competitor’s site.
But now I hang my head in shame because I never thought to extend this olive branch—the service provider report.
Disclaimer: this works best for mid-size – large companies that would have their own service provider
Seeing the Light
The idea to look at the Google Analytics Service Provider report came to me like most of my good ideas–at 4 in the morning. I was interested in how I could use GA to anticipate a competitor’s products. Once in the Google Analytics account, I searched through the report for my competitor’s name and found some data (phew!) that I used to create a report in Tableau. The finished Tableau report had some pretty unique insights into what content and products the competitor was most interested in on our website, and I was able to make some educated guesses on what they’d release next #win.
Brighter Days
Like a soul reborn I haven’t stopped preaching to my peers about the interesting data they can find in this report, and now I’m ready to share my ideas with you. I’m using the Google demo account to show you how to use this report, so the following scenario is completely made up.
Now, let’s pretend that I’m a Googler who’s heard some buzzing in the office that Microsoft wants to bring back their Scroogled merchandise. I want to know what Google Merchandise Store products they’re most interested in, so that I can anticipate what types of products they’ll come out with so I can anticipate what kinds of products my coworkers and I will buy this time.
Know Your Competitors
I learned a lot during my time on the agency side, the most surprising because I was fresh out of college? That a lot of companies don’t have a clear picture of their competitors, so it’s important that you do some preliminary research to define yours.
Not sure where to start? Here are some high-level things I’d do:
Ask your customers/boss. Depending on your business, you can take this a step further and ask lost leads who they have decided to go with instead.
Keyword research.Use a keyword search tool or Google to learn what companies appear in the search results for your product/service keywords.
Google Trends. Enter a relevant keyword to your business and see what appears. Play with the location to narrow the search and check out the related queries section to see what other keywords those users searched for.
Identify Your Competitor in Your Google Analytics Data
Now that you’ve identified a competitor you want to analyze, you need to find them in the data. Head to the Network Report from the Technology Report category in the side menu or by using the menu’s search functionality for “network”.
Now that you have the Network report open, search for the company you’re interested in analyzing. At this point, you can also use a secondary dimension like location to make sure you are looking at the right company. Washington, New York and California are Microsoft hubs, so i feel safe assuming this is largely employee traffic.
Additionally, play with the date range to understand how long the users have engaged with your site (for this example, I went back to January 1, 2017).
Other data points to explore:
Day of week and hour of day: Are you in a 9-5 industry, but seeing a ton of weekend traffic? It may not be your competitor. Additionally, keep in mind that your GA data is based on your local time, so keep this in mind if your competitor is in another timezone.
Search terms: Find out what terms they were looking for on your site. This can tell you a ton about their intent.
Source/Medium: Are they using up your marketing budget clicking on your paid ads?
I love to dig into the data, so I created a segment to give me more flexibility to jump in and out of reports and to save me from having to search through the Network report to find these users later. If you’ve never created a segment before, it’s very simple and Google Analytics has great documentation on creating segments.
Here is the segment I created for Microsoft users in Redmond, WA (their headquarters):
Conditions
Service Provider: “microsoft corporation”
City: “Redmond”
Region: “Washington”
Now to the Good Stuff
Knowing what products and content users are viewing on your site is the most important data to provide stakeholders, and it’s no different when doing competitor research.
If you are an ecommerce business, add the segment you created and take a look at the Ecommerce reports to see if your competitors have purchased any products. In my example, I can see that Microsoft employees bought 13 t-shirts on October 3, 2018.
But I’m assuming that most competitors are not buying products our website, so we’ll want to look at the things like product views and top pages to discover what they’re most interested in on our website.
Make it Work
While it’s fun to simply discover what kind of data you get from your GA account, if you want to impress your team, you’ll need to add context and insight to the data. For example, if you see a spike in your competitor’s traffic on your site, try to correlate that with contextual information you have.
Did your marketing team send out a press release about your latest product?
Was your team in the news during that time frame?
Does this time frame line up your competitor’s latest patent filing?
Not only will this additional research help your company’s VIPs get more value out of these reports, it will get everyone excited to learn more about Google Analytics. Sharing with your marketing team that their social media post had your competitors shook will get them invested in your data, bringing you one step closer to your 2019 performance goal of creating a data-driven culture.
So, what are you waiting for? Take just 20 minutes today to uncover the wealth of knowledge in your Service Provider report today!
Get ahead of the competition with insights into their strategies. Book a discovery call to learn how to leverage Google Analytics for competitive analysis.
