Comparing your online marketing ROI with competitors can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, optimize your budget and strategy, and benchmark your performance. But how do you get reliable and relevant data to make a fair and accurate comparison? Here are some steps you can take to measure and compare your online marketing ROI with competitors.
When planning your online marketing campaigns, the first step is to determine what you want to achieve and how you will measure success. This will vary depending on your business model, industry, and target audience. For example, you may aim to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive sales, or improve customer loyalty. To track ROI, you should consider metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLV), return on ad spend (ROAS), conversion rate (CR), and bounce rate (BR). CPA measures how much you spend to acquire a new customer, CLV evaluates the revenue generated over the customer's relationship with you, ROAS measures how much revenue you earn for every dollar spent on ads, CR measures how many visitors complete a desired action on your website or landing page, and BR indicates how many visitors leave without taking any action.
The next step is to collect and analyze your own data using various tools and platforms. You can use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or other web analytics tools to track your website traffic, conversions, and behavior. You can also use email marketing, social media, or other online marketing tools to track your campaign performance, engagement, and reach. You should also monitor your online reputation, reviews, and feedback from your customers and prospects. You can use tools like Google Alerts, Mention, or Trustpilot to track your online mentions and ratings.
Include Emotion Recognition & get a better measure of what people are feeling about you or your product from text, voice, or biometric data. You can gain key insights on user’s expressions of fear, anger, sadness, love/joy. Emotion Recognition can tell you exactly what they're upset about, how strongly they feel that way, and in which direction the emotion is trending. Use this in social listening, in-bound marketing, chatbots and virtual assistants to understand your users. You can use tools like VERN AI to detect emotions in voice or text in real time. You can also use iMotions for facial recognition, or Hume AI to analyze voice communications, reviews and feedback .
The third step is to research your competitors and their online marketing strategies. You can use tools like SimilarWeb, SEMrush, or SpyFu to get insights into their website traffic, keywords, ads, and backlinks. You can also use tools like BuzzSumo, Social Blade, or Sprout Social to analyze their content, social media, and influencer marketing. You should also visit their websites, landing pages, blogs, and social media profiles to see how they present their value proposition, offers, and calls to action.
Be sure to make use of the Google, Meta and LinkedIn ad libraries. These show you all the ads your competitors are running in all locations. Whilst they don't provide specific stats on the ads, they give you a good understanding of the types of ads your competitors are running on an ongoing basis, and therefore some insight into what is working well for them.
The fourth step is to compare your data with your competitors and identify the gaps and opportunities. You can use tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, or Excel to create dashboards and charts that visualize your data and compare your metrics. You can also use tools like SWOT analysis, Porter's five forces, or benchmarking to evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to your competitors. You should also consider the external factors that may affect your online marketing ROI, such as market trends, customer preferences, and industry regulations.
The final step is to adjust your online marketing strategy based on your comparison and analysis. You can use tools like Google Optimize, Unbounce, or HubSpot to test and optimize your website, landing pages, and campaigns. You can also use tools like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Mailchimp to create and manage your online marketing campaigns. You should also monitor your online marketing ROI regularly and update your goals and metrics as needed.