The benefits of competitive benchmarking of website traffic

How Alphix Trends and Signals can help you stay ahead of the competition

Key points:

• Benchmarking website traffic against competitors provides marketers with a range of benefits, including identifying market trends, setting realistic goals and making data-driven decisions.
• Alphix Trends creates an index against which to measure site traffic for asset managers.
• Alphix Signals aggregates data from the sector and tracks the relative coverage of different topics, making it possible to identify changes in the consumption of topics.

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, staying ahead of the competition is crucial for businesses looking to thrive online. One essential tool in a marketer's arsenal is benchmarking website traffic against competitors. This practice involves comparing and analysing your website's performance metrics against those of your rivals. By doing so, businesses gain valuable insights that inform their marketing strategies, drive growth, and enhance their understanding of their market position.

Here's why benchmarking website traffic against competitors is a fundamental aspect of marketing knowledge and understanding:

1. Competitive analysis: Benchmarking helps businesses gain a clearer picture of how they stack up against their competition. By examining metrics like website traffic, pageviews, topic consumption and geo-distribution, you can identify areas where you outperform your competitors and areas where you fall short. This competitive analysis serves as a foundation for making informed decisions to improve your online presence.
2. Measuring success: Success in marketing is not just about hitting arbitrary numbers; it's about outperforming your competitors. Benchmarking helps you define what success means in the context of your industry. It enables you to gauge whether your marketing efforts are paying off in terms of website traffic and user engagement relative to your competitors.
3. Identifying market trends: Monitoring aggregated website traffic patterns from over 50 asset managers’ sites allows you to spot emerging market trends and consumer preferences. For example, if you notice a topic (e.g. private credit) experiencing a sudden surge in traffic, you can apply this intelligence into your own strategy to match your offering to current market demand.
4. Setting realistic goals: Benchmarking provides a benchmark (hence the name) against which you can set realistic goals for your website's performance. By comparing your traffic metrics to the wider market, you can establish achievable targets that align with industry standards and your market position.
5. Data-driven decision making: Marketing decisions become more data-driven when you have insights from benchmarking. This allows you to allocate resources more efficiently, invest in strategies that are likely to yield the best results, and avoid costly trial-and-error approaches.
6. Adapting to market changes: The digital landscape is constantly evolving. By continually benchmarking your website traffic against competitors, you can adapt to changes in consumer behaviour, search engine algorithms, and industry trends in real-time. This agility is crucial for staying competitive and relevant.
7. Enhancing user experience: Analysing your website traffic relative to the wider sector can help you identify areas where you can improve the user experience on your site. Whether it’s through faster loading times, better navigation, or more engaging content, enhancing your website's user experience can lead to increased traffic and conversions.
8. Gaining a competitive edge: Armed with insights from benchmarking, you can identify gaps in the market and develop strategies to gain a competitive edge. This may involve targeting specific keywords, creating better content, or refining your social media marketing efforts.

How does Alphix Trends provide competitive intelligence for asset managers?

Competitive analysis

Alphix Trends creates an index against which to measure site traffic for asset managers. The image below is an example of a ‘Trends Tile’ for fixed income in a specific country.

The grey line shows the relative position for this asset manager on the amount of content they have on their site on fixed income, whilst the blue line shows the relative position of the volume of pageviews to the competitive set.

The blue area chart shows the aggregate of pageviews across the competitive set.

The Trends Tile can be created for any topic, based on a grouping of keywords and phrases with ’and’, ‘or’ and ’not’ logic gates.

Measuring success

By overlaying advertising activity volume (spend, impression or click data), it’s possible to visualise the impact of your marketing activities with your comparative index position on the Trends Tile.

In the example above, it’s possible to see the impact of the advertising activity on the trend line. Where activity has high, the impact on the trend line is evident. The expenditure in April resulted in the trend line increasing to 100%.

The insight from this? The expenditure for April resulted in this manager’s ESG content being the most read of all asset managers in the index. The advertising/market activity and spend deployed to achieve this was extremely high performing.

When planning budgets or assessing the impact of a campaign, viewing the trend line relative to your competitors provides an insight into the success the campaign has achieved in driving traffic to your site, relative to your competitor set.

Identifying market trends (Signals)

By aggregating data from the sector and tracking the relative coverage of different topics, it’s possible to identify changes in the consumption of topics.

In the example above, the Signals report is comparing the consumption of content on ‘Liquidity, Volatility & Risk’ with the consumption of content on ‘Fixed Income’.

In July, it’s clear that the aggregate data from UK investors (consumption across all asset managers in the Alphix Index) showed a substantial increase in consumption of content discussing ‘Liquidity, volatility & risk’ which coincided with a marked decrease in consumption of content on ‘Fixed Income’.

As a marketer, this intelligence, at country level, provides insight (Signals) to influence marketing messages. From this data, the signal can be taken to reduce promotion of messaging around fixed income, and increase content advising clients on strategies to deal with volatility and risk.

Understanding Alphix Trends Tiles

Alphix Trends aggregates data to provide benchmark, signal and attribution data, by topic for each country of relevance.

The Topic Tile shows the comparative position on the Alphix Index for content and pageviews on topic (e.g. ESG). Topic Tiles can be created for any asset class, strategy, philosophy or focus utilising ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘not’ logic gates.

The Signals chart shows the change over time of the proportion of content on the topic against an annual 365-day rolling average.

By linking your advertising data into Alphix, you can overlay spend, impressions and clicks data to your Trends Tile to attribute spend to performance.