Complete Web Monitoring

Preparing a Competitive Report

If you’re in charge of competitive research, you’ll want to publish a competitive brief at regular intervals to your product and sales teams, as well as members of your executive management team. You’ll also want to send real-time updates when important news breaks.

What’s in a Weekly Competitive Report

The purpose of the weekly report is to give your internal audience an at-a-glance understanding of key performance indicators you’re tracking. Information should include:

• A list of competitors you’re tracking, with basic business information, such as stock price and number of employees.

• Any newcomers to the list, as well as any who have been removed.

• Charts for each metric you’re comparing, such as traffic volumes, Google PageRank, Technorati ranking, uptime, performance, and number of mentions. Include one series line for each competitor, and clearly show your own organization for comparison.

• A table showing the score for each competitor, as well as the change from the previous reporting period.

• A summary of activity for each competitor, including any changes detected in each one’s online content as well as links to any important news picked up through alerts or feeds.

• Community reports for any online profiles your competitors operate, such as the volume of Twitter messages, contributions to groups or forums, and so on.

Once you start to publish regular competitive reports, you’ll train the company in what to expect.

Communicating Competitive Information

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