Competitor Analysis Tool Upgraded to Include More Data & Flexibility

HubSpot has released a major upgrade to the popular Competitor Analysis tool. Thousands of HubSpot customers have already used this tool to keep tabs on how they’re performing against their competitors according to the most important metrics of inbound marketing. This latest release marks the most significant upgrade yet to this tool, bringing you even more fine-grained data, increased flexibility in sorting and displaying your data, and more expert advice on how to increase and maintain your competitive edge.

Marketing grade replaces website grade

The most significant change you’ll notice will be what each website’s overall grade is based on. In the past, the overall grade for a company was based on the old Website Grader grade. In the new Competitor Analysis tool, the overall grade is based on the new and far more comprehensive Marketing Grade. Marketing Grade looks at a company’s overall marketing performance, including historical Website Grades, social media, lead generation, mobile, and other available metrics. It’s important to note that the new Marketing Grade, because it relies on so many different and variable inputs, is more sensitive to daily changes. So you might see more fluctuation in this measurement than you did in the old tool. This is generally attributable to recent activities on social media and in content creation. We think you’ll find that the new overall score offers a more up-to-date and accurate assessment of your marketing than before, giving you a more data-rich basis for your marketing decisions.

Beyond the overall score, we also made several upgrades to the user interface that we think you’ll really enjoy.

New sources graph

A new filter bar above the main graph now lets you decide which metric you want to sort by and display. This means you can more easily track how you are performing against your competitors on key metrics like mozRank, linking domains, and Twitter followers. Want a quick look at how you stack up against your peers in terms of Facebook fans, indexed pages, unique visitors? Now you can.

See what changed in your score

Clicking on any data point in the graph gives you a detailed rundown of all the metrics that changed in your score since the last time you viewed the report.

Get your full report

Click on any of the website URLs in your list to instantly run a full Marketing Grade report for the website. Find out how you can start improving your marketing performance based on the data in the report.

Bookmark your favorite reports

Do you have a specific metric or timeframe that you keep coming back to in your Competitors report? Great. Now you can bookmark any filter view, just as you can in your Sources report, and easily return to that view whenever you’d like.

Responding to early user feedback

We released the new Competitor Analysis tool a few weeks ago, and since then we’ve received some very useful feedback about how we can make this tool better. The most common suggestion was that we reconsider changing the traffic metric used in the tool from Alexa Rank to Compete’s Unique Visitors. As it turns out, Compete offers very accurate data from a very robust user panel, but their data is limited to the United States. Unsurprisingly, this limitation caused considerable consternation to our customers outside the US, as our use of Compete’s data instead of Alexa’s resulted in significantly lower scores or even no data for this metric. In response to this feedback, we’ve returned Alexa Rank to the tool.

Another suggestion we heard from you was to improve the way the tool handled episodes of occasional unreliability in our third party data sources. While every third party data source will always be subject to some variability, we’ve redesigned the tool so that it responds more consistently to these fluctuations, offering you a more reliable and consistent experience. From now on, your score won’t be affected if a numerical drop is being caused by a temporary outage of one of our data sources. Your score will only change based on changes in the actual online marketing landscape -- either actions you’ve taken, your competitors have taken, or changes in visitor behavior.

We also received terrific feedback from you about how we could make your data easier to read, scan, and navigate in the tool. We’ve made a number of subtle changes in the interface to respond to this feedback, and will continue to adjust things as we learn more about how you use the tool and how it can help you do your job.

So enjoy the new Competitor Analysis tool. Take a look around, and please keep the feedback coming -- we love to find new ways to improve your HubSpot experience.