Understanding how you stack up in your market is one of the key elements in competitive research. Knowing your market trends can help you dive into a new niche market, make partnerships, or conduct a thorough analysis of an entire market.
The best place to monitor these trends will be with Market Explorer.
Step 1. Enter your domain into Market Explorer.
From here, Market Explorer will pull your top 10 and top 20 domain’s in your market. In this example, we used adidas.com, so you can see the market is focused on shoes and sporting goods.
Step 2. Utilize the Growth Quadrant to see the Niche players, Game changers, Leaders, and Established players in your market.
Each of these quadrants has its own characteristics that are based on both traffic volume and traffic growth percentage.
Niche Players - Generally haven’t gained a large online audience, nor has their traffic been growing actively. These may be beginners or stronger businesses that have just started their expansion in a target region. Think low traffic volume + low growth rate.
Game Changers - Traffic is relatively low, but the growth rate exceeds the market average. They may become new Leaders of the market. Low traffic volume + high growth rate.
Leaders - Websites that have a significant audience and a fast pace of growth. These may be well-known companies expanding to a new region. High traffic volume + high growth rate.
Established Players - They have a big audience and a fairly steady flow of traffic that doesn’t surge month to month. High traffic volume + low growth rate.
To monitor recent trends of growth, you can filter your Growth Quadrant by quarter over quarter and year over year to see the growth path of each domain. Observing this growth can give you insight into the entire market’s development.
Comparing historical data to the current state, you can better estimate the stability of your competitors’ positions in the industry and be prepared for future growth.
Step 3. Look at the total traffic trends of a market.
This is especially helpful if you are in a market that is seasonal such as swimwear or snow gear. Look at the peaks and valleys of the graph to understand where the market is heading month to month. If you are a holiday-centric business use this as a way to understand when you should ramp up marketing and content efforts and when you should pull back in order to maximize your ROI.
After following these steps, you’ll have a better understanding of how your market is trending. However, if you want to dive deeper into how you are stacking up with your competitors you should check out the following tools:
You can also check out the related workflows below this page.