Websites are an ever- evolving marketing tool with new features, trends and requirements coming up every year. Certainly it’s impractical to plan on a new website every year, but there are many ways you can build longevity into your site without having to undergo a major overhaul every time. From mobile-friendly and responsive design to easy content management systems, there are a few areas you can focus on when creating a website that will optimize your experience and, more importantly, the user’s experience, and helps you get more mileage. A website benchmark analysis can be a stepping stone in defining the organizational goals and leading the digital transformation journey.
A website benchmark can be made not only with your direct competitors but also other websites that have similar kind of features and are targeting products or services to markets similar to yours. So, if you are for example in the Pharmaceutical business, you might want to benchmark your site against other non-pharmaceutical and innovative pharmaceutical sites in different spaces to see how they structure their services. It helps in analyzing all aspects of your business, to find elements that are working efficiently and that needs to be improved for optimal performance. Comparisons across competitors is the key aspect that can help identify positional gaps in your website strategy. Measuring against benchmarks could reveal major drawbacks in your website, mobile experience, social media, content, digital strategy—and the list goes on.
Many companies make the mistake of judging performance compared to other units or departments within the same company. It is similar to a runner trying to beat their own best time for a ten-meter dash. While this strategy is helpful, it’s also smart for the runner to try to beat the best time of their fiercest competitor as well.
Steps involved in website benchmarking
- What to benchmark
- Select benchmarking partner
- Develop data collection plan and analyze it
- Identify research sources and initiate data gathering
- Conduct a site visit
- Goals for improvement
- Develop a recommended implementation plan
Three Primary Classifications of Benchmarking
Although there are many forms of benchmarking, they can be classified into three categories – internal, competitive and strategic.
Internal benchmarking used when a company already has established and proven best practices, and they simply need to share them.
Competitive benchmarking used when a company wants to evaluate its position within its industry. Also, competitive benchmarking is used when a company needs to identify industry leadership performance targets.
Strategic benchmarking used when identifying and analyzing world-class performance, and a company needs to diversify irrespective of the industry.
Website benchmarking’s main advantage is to have a general understanding of what a competitor is doing right, and what you could be doing better. It includes anything from traffic - why do they have lots of traffic: is it the size of the site? The inbound links? The age of the site? The keywords used? The referring sites? The SEO? The Page quality? - To the ability to convert leads into customers. By the time that understanding has been turned an action plan, you would already know what features or functions should be modified, added or removed to improve your website.
Start your website benchmarking today and know what others are doing, acknowledge their strategy and perhaps validate, or use the learnings to figure out, your own. Place a comment below to let us know how it’s going for you.
