How Compete.com Uses Search Marketing to Attract 3x More Traffic Than Competitors & Turns Those Visitors Into Paid Subscribers

Insider’s interview with Sr. Internet Marketing Manager Drew Fortin reveals how Compete.com uses SEO to get double and triple the amount of traffic as

Quick Overview

Launched in 2008, Compete.com sells subscriptions to its business information database to marketers at mid-sized organizations. Thanks to great search marketing, the site gets nearly triple the traffic of older competitors. And they’ve stolen a brilliant homepage design from B2C subscription database sites (like dating sites) to get those visitors interacting with content right away. Read on for a key lesson they’ve learned about which packages sell best when you offer multiple subscription tiers, and our Insider analysis of one simple thing they could do immediately to really generate more leads for subscription sales.

Target Audience

Subscribers come from companies of all sizes, but the primary audience is marketing generalists at mid-sized companies seeking to benchmark their site’s Web traffic and search performance against competitors’. Consultants and small agencies in a specific niche, such as SEO, represent a secondary market.

Content Model

Compete Inc., a consulting firm targeting Fortune 500 companies, launched in 2000 and began assembling a panel of web users who agreed to have their online activity tracked and analyzed. Compete Inc. uses this data to provide custom research and consulting to large companies on a contract basis.

The panel now features 2 million web users — which the company claims is the largest panel of its kind. The group includes 350,000 individuals who have installed “clickstream collection” software that lets the company track their online activity, including the sites they visit, where they click, what search terms they use, and so on. The panel also includes user data shared by ISP and ASP partners.

“Without the panel of users, we wouldn’t have that data and there would be no Compete.com,” says Fortin. “That’s our lifeblood, so there’s a whole team dedicated to it.”

The team works to keep current panel members active, while continually growing and diversifying the number of users. They directly recruit individuals through email marketing and by working with partner organizations. They also find potential panelists by working with other research organizations owned by Kantar Media, Compete Inc.’s parent company.

In 2008, the company decided to further monetize this panel by launching subscription offerings at Compete.com that targeted the next tier of prospects — mid-sized companies that aren’t in the market for custom research services. Those competitive intelligence and marketing research tools include:

– Search Analytics, which tracks the terms that drive the most traffic to a selected website and which websites rank highest for specific terms.

– Referral Analytics, which tracks where visitors come from before landing on a selected website and where they go immediately after leaving.

– Site Profiles, which provide traffic statistics and audience demographics for millions of domains.

– Ranked Lists, which let users see the top sites for specific metrics, such as unique visitors, time, spent, etc.

Revenue Streams

Compete.com’s revenues come from website subscriptions and a fee-based API.

The site offers four subscription tiers: “Intro” subscriptions cost $199 a month; “Standard” subscriptions cost $299/month; “Advanced” subscriptions cost $499/month. Enterprise subscriptions are available for companies that want full access for more than one user, and are priced according to the number of users.

The company has not changed its subscription pricing or packages since launching more than two years ago, because Fortin says his team is still studying metrics to determine what changes they may want to make.

For example, they’ve noticed that the most popular tiers are the Intro and Advanced packages (for $199 and $499, respectively). Fewer subscribers chose the Standard package, which only offers a bit more data and functionality than the Intro tier. Fortin suspects that many visitors choose to test the site on the lowest package possible, or decide from the free user experience that they want full access to the data immediately.

Although the site offers a 16% discount for purchasing an annual subscription, most users choose the monthly option. It’s not uncommon for users to sign up for a month or two (perhaps when working researching a new marketing strategy), drop out for a couple of months, then return for a few more months of research.

Besides subscriptions, the site also offers an API that lets organizations feed Compete.com’s data into their own marketing dashboards or business intelligence platforms. Like the web subscriptions, the API has a free and paid tier: The basic API sets limits on the number of data calls a company can make and the metrics they can access. All-Access API gives unlimited access to all Compete.com data, and pricing is negotiated on a custom basis.

Marketing Tactics

The site relies on a three-tiered approach to drive traffic, turn visitors into free users, and nurture prospects until they become paying customers:

Interactive homepage to turn visitors into users

Compete.com’s homepage isn’t a static thing that visitors must step over, or through, to get to the content. Taking cues from consumer subscription database sites like Match.com or Classmates.com, they’ve placed an engagement device right on the homepage that immediately draws visitors into the content.

The engagement device at Compete.com is a prominent search box that lets visitors enter up to three domains and receive a comparison of basic web traffic statistics. The free test of the site’s content lets visitors see for themselves how the services work and what kind of data is available. Free users get enough data to make the tool useful, while also getting shown what additional data is only available to subscribers.

“Our most effective tactic, bar none, has been our freemium model,” says Fortin.

Search marketing to drive traffic

Thanks to a concerted SEO push, Compete.com receives double or triple the amount of traffic of their competitors comScore and Hitwise. The site also has twice as many inbound links as comScore.

Major destinations for natural search traffic and links include the site profile pages the company publishes on nearly 3 million sites. The company also operates a blog that has more than 100 in-house contributors (from Compete.com and Compete Inc.) to cover a range of digital media and marketing topics, such as email, search, and social media. It’s ranked #17 on Ad Age’s “Power 150” blog rankings.

And offering basic traffic data has been enough to get Compete.com numbers cited by journalists, bloggers, and other free users, helping build brand awareness, links, and site visits.

The team also spends about 10% of its overall marketing budget on paid search. They buy brand terms as well as industry terms, such as “competitive intelligence,” and direct clicks to specific landing pages with an offer and embedded video.

Proactive lead generation

The company just waits for prospects to stumble upon the site through search or links. They also use proactive B2B lead generation techniques to develop a prospect database for nurturing. For example, last year they ran a co-branded webinar/whitepaper series with a partner focused on digital marketing that added 5,000 quality leads to the prospect database.

The marketing team studies those records to determine whether the prospect is a better match for a Compete.com subscription or Compete Inc. contract services, and then plans marketing follow-up accordingly. For example, some prospects may receive an introductory discount offer for an online subscription.

Technology and Vendors Used

Compete.com uses proprietary software and algorithms to track and analyze its web user panel data. But they also rely on several third-party technology partners for marketing and site operations (listed in alphabetical order).

Bronto: The site’s email service provider

http://www.bronto.com

ClickEquations: PPC bidding management software

http://www.clickequations.com

Google Analytics: Web analytics platform to analyze their own site traffic

http://www.google.com/analytics

Hootsuite: Social media management tool to link all social media accounts with the blog

http://www.hootsuite.com

Omniture: Another web analytics platform used to measure site traffic

http://www.omniture.com/en/

VisibleGains: Platform to create online marketing videos

http://www.visiblegains.com/

About Drew Fortin

Fortin developed his direct marketing skills as a B2C digital marketer for Staples.com, where he learned the power of using customer data and analytics to shape marketing campaigns.

When he joined Compete.com he found a similar data-driven approach — but with key difference between the B2C ecommerce world and his new, B2B content focus: “We’re in a position of marketing to marketers,” he says. “They know the process and know about marketing, so it’s a lot more difficult to make that connection, translate the value of the product, and ultimately convince them to buy it.”

Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis

Compete.com’s homepage is genius. More B2B information databases should adapt this B2C approach that puts an engagement device directly on the homepage.

But as good as they are a getting that traffic, they don’t do a good job turning visitors into leads from the homepage or the site profile pages. We couldn’t find an email opt-in form anywhere on the homepage or the site profile pages. Adding an opt-in box to every page — or, even better, an overlay screen — could really pump up that prospect database for lead gen efforts.

And we think they could improve sales of annual subscriptions by testing new ways to promote the annual option. Currently, the savings offered by an annual subscription are listed in a smaller font beneath the monthly price on the offer page. The monthly — not the annual — subscription option is pre-checked on the registration form, and that page also lists the 16% annual savings offered by the annual subscription listed in tiny text. It seems like they’re almost sheepish about asking users to commit to a full-year subscription.

Homepage:

http://www.compete.com

Blog:

http://blog.compete.com/

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