Two Approaches to Analyzing Competitor UX
By Matthew Edgar · Last Updated: July 19, 2017
During my MozCon presentation in 2017, I was asked a question about how you measure user experience on a competitor’s site. This is a site you don’t control so you can’t place analytics code on it and rarely are competitors going to open up their analytics for you to review.
Admittedly, I wasn’t totally prepared to answer this question on stage but it is a great question. I stumbled out two recommendations as an answer not entirely sure what was I saying would make too much sense. Judging by the reaction and Twitter responses, I apparently did make some sense. I wanted to elaborate on this post and share this approach with people who weren’t in attendance.
The first recommendation is to do usability testing on your competitor’s site—either in person or remote. Interviews could work in a similar way. Usability testing or interviews offer you a way to get some ideas about what people are thinking about your competitor’s site and areas they struggle with on the competitor’s website. Whatever problems exist on the competitor’s website becomes opportunities for you. The downside is that usability testing (especially in person) can be tough to get approval or budget for—it is hard enough to get approval to do usability testing on your own site. That said, if you are doing usability testing on your site, be sure to also look at competitor sites too as part of the testing process.
Another approach to take, and the one that can be a bit more helpful, involves copying your competitor’s site to a test area you control then measuring the results. The approach breaks down as follows:
- Copy the page(s) on your competitor’s site that you want to test out to a testing or staging environment. Two tips:
- Keep things simple and keep all the pages you are testing static. You can save a page in the browser (Save Page As -> Web Page Complete) to get the HTML and all associated files. Then upload the HTML and files to the test area for each page. You will probably need to tweak a few links to string different pages together. With this approach, you can have a test environment setup in very little time.
- Of course, as you do this be nice and behave ethically. Make sure you noindex, nofollow this page or just outright block the test domain by requiring a password to access this page. You do not want your copy of the competitor’s page to be indexed or accessible outside of the testing area (one, because this would help your competitor and two, it keeps lawyers way happier).
- Setup all the analytics tracking code so you can measure everything you’d want to know about the competitor’s UX on the test environment version of the pages. Although my general approach is to keep the analytics simple, in this instance, it is worth going a bit overboard and setting up everything you can possibly think of to track.
- Using a service like Microworkers, you can pay for traffic to come to your testing environment. Do your best to target the right kind of people, at a minimum by country. Give the test traffic general guidelines but avoid anything asking terribly specific. For example, don’t ask people to make a purchase on an ecommerce site, but ask them to consider purchasing this product if they are interested. This more closely mirrors what the competitor’s real traffic might look like (and likely what your traffic might look like).
- Once the data is collected, take down the test site and analyze your data. You’ll start to understand where people might be struggling to interact on a competitor’s site. What links are they motivated to link? Where do they scroll? Where do they move their mouse? And more.
Obviously, you are never going to know exactly what is happening on your competitor’s site unless a competitor grants you access to their metrics. But, using techniques like this is a great way to figure out what may or may not be working. From there, you can get some ideas on how to change things on your site and some great ideas for things to split test.
Twitter Responses
He said you can re-create your competitors high-performing UX/UI pages on your own site (or subdomain) & measure its metrics. Killer!
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 18, 2017
Us when @MatthewEdgarCO casually drops his baller idea for gathering competitor UX insights #mozcon pic.twitter.com/TkMKdiv0G6
— Seer Interactive (@SeerInteractive) July 18, 2017
My face when @MatthewEdgarCO shared his idea for testing a competitors site #MozCon Great talk! pic.twitter.com/kpWt7dXyez
— miguel lopez (@miglpz) July 18, 2017
