This Brand Made 10 Million a Year, What Did They Do Right? How to Monitor Competitor Traffic and Market Situation? Complete Guide to Learning from Competitors (Part 1)
This brand made 10 million a year, what did they do right? Learning from competitors is important, but doing your own work well is more important. This article explains how to correctly use tools to monitor competitor traffic and market situations.
The Right Way to Learn from Competitors
This is one of the most common questions I see from newcomers in groups and social media, and I highly agree with this learning approach (learning best practices). So I'm planning to start a mini-series to deeply explore how to learn from competitors for independent sites:
- Why is learning from competitors so important for independent sites? (Why)
- When we talk about learning from competitors, what exactly are we learning? (What)
- Who can be our learnable competitors? How to find competitors? (Who)
- How to use the right tools to find the answers we need? (How)
For the first issue, let's start from the end and work backwards. This might be more suitable for newcomers who are eager to get hands-on practice. At the same time, this is also what I encourage everyone to do - don't worry too much at the beginning, just roll up your sleeves and get started. Taking action is better than anything else. Finally, we'll summarize the insights together.
Starting with a Picture, the Rest is Made Up
Sellers, all those plugins like XXXX Spy, I promise you, just throw them directly in the trash, okay? And stay away from those bloggers too. Why?
1) Try it yourself: Can you install this plugin yourself and then monitor your own site? See if it's accurate yourself? What? You're asking why so many social media bloggers also use this? Are they lying to us? Of course they're lying to you! Starting with a picture, the rest is made up. Didn't I teach you before? These bloggers don't need to understand the specific business of independent sites. They're probably just salespeople in small studios selling courses and shovels. Traffic is king, they'll make whatever newcomers love to see.
2) Use your brain: The core operating data of a site, you, a poor little nobody, can easily get it just by installing a Chrome plugin and clicking with your little hand?? Then what about those professional consulting companies and investment institutions doing research? Just hire you, right? Don't do cross-border e-commerce independent sites anymore, go open a consulting company. Your daily work would be clicking plugins to understand the performance of any online retail globally. With your input-output ratio, you'd be the fifth largest firm after the Big Four in 2024.
3) Spear and shield? I even found a no-spy plugin, but look at its core features - "prevent right-click" and "prevent copy". For these features, it charges $15/month. Programmers would cry and faint in the toilet. Is cross-border newcomers' money that easy to earn? Think about what would happen if you use those spy plugins to monitor a site that has installed a no-spy plugin?
The Right Way: Tools Section
Note! Any tool, any method is just for reference, data is not absolutely accurate!
Tools: There are only these two tools, don't waste time researching others. These tools have free trials for newcomers, enough for you to play around with. After the trial, you can also buy shared accounts on certain e-commerce platforms, which should be enough for your use (see the end for money-saving tips!)
1) Semrush and other SEO tools (others like Ahrefs, Moz, Ubersuggest are generally similar)
2) Similarweb
Basic tool usage notes: Adjust various data calibers, including countries/regions, time ranges, device types, etc. Next, let's micro-analyze the questions that newcomers love to ask.
The Right Way: How to Judge Their GMV
Again, note! Any tool, any method is just for reference!
My most commonly used method is using the following simple formula:
Traffic x Average Conversion Rate x Average Order Value
Traffic: From the tools above, we can roughly estimate the traffic range. Let's say we estimate 12,000 people visit the site monthly.
Conversion Rate: Through your judgment of the industry/traffic channels, for example, I estimate the conversion rate might be around 0.7%. (Again, disclaimer: this number is just an example, you need your own judgment of the industry!) Note! The conversion rate here requires you to have some comprehensive market understanding of the industry, category, and market! to make a judgment. Of course, newcomers might have no concept of this at all, so my suggestion is, if it's not a very special industry, you can blindly estimate around 1%. What affects conversion rate? For example, order value (higher price might mean lower rate), traffic channels (Google traffic might be higher, social media might be lower), and many other comprehensive factors. But since we're newcomers and not doing professional research reports, it's enough to get a general baseline.
Average Order Value: Just take a look at their official website to get an idea, for example, 600 pounds.
Then the site's monthly GMV would be approximately: 12,000 x 0.7% x 600 = 50k pounds.
Note, this is just the monthly revenue for the site's DTC channel. If you add up other distribution channels, agents, platforms, etc., their overall performance scale will definitely be more than this number. Of course, as small individual sellers, we don't really need to consider these.
The Right Way: Learning to Recognize Market and Objective Laws
"This website, a couple, made 10 million a year."
"This post-90s made 100 million a year with independent sites. What did he do right?" "This post-00s girl sells jewelry and makes $300k a month!"
How many newcomers have been deceived by these stupid or bad clickbait titles and then "fell into the pit"?
1. Recognize Basic Common Sense and Objective Laws
In front of legal and compliant businesses, regardless of what category, industry, channel, or method you're doing. How much resources you invest (human resources, money, time, ability), and how big of a scale you can ultimately achieve (revenue, profit), etc., these are just basic common sense and cognition. You don't need any professional research; it's simply that you need to face reality.
Too many newcomers get "cut" or even "scammed" because they don't want to face reality, right? It's all because of greed and laziness. Oh, someone online casually tells you there's a business that makes huge profits, 50% profit margin, 30% annual return, come on, dropshipping without stocking inventory, come be a startup partner. And you're still there stupidly laughing "hehe, I found a good business today". You deserve to be scammed.
Some sisters might be slightly more rational and don't believe it. These bloggers will then add a sentence like "hehe, you can't make money beyond your cognition" to further deceive and PUA you and try to break you down.
Some newcomers say, I really don't understand these so-called "basic common sense", what should I do? I don't know what effort a person needs to put in to achieve what return, I have no concept. My suggestion is, find your closest circle of offline relatives/friends, and under the premise of ensuring they won't scam you, go see what they do, overall what their capabilities are, what their input and output are. And your circle means your approximate resource capability upper and lower limits (within your cognition). You can't ask Jack Ma or Elon Musk, right?
So, wake up, please, little leeks.
2. Micro-Understanding of Approximate Resource Investment Levels
When you have a basic awareness of fraud prevention, we can use some tool methods to judge the investment of this business:
Time Cost
"This site gets 10k+ in natural free traffic monthly, making 10 million a year!" You're tempted, right? Oh so tempting, free traffic, no money spent, and can make huge profits! Not to mention whether your capital investment and abilities are enough, first go back and see how long they've persisted. Domain name over 10 years, formal operation for at least 4+ years. Ask yourself honestly, can you persist in doing something for 4 years? Just you? Giving up weight loss after 3 days? Reading a book for a year without finishing? Memorizing English words and only remembering "Abandon"? Don't just envy their results; go see their efforts.
Other Resource Costs
Even if they're relying on free traffic now, go check their advertising investment costs during the startup period. Do you have that capability?
Again, emphasis, the above cases are just randomly found for discussing competitor analysis methods, and I'm not making any evaluation of whether these brands are good or bad.
