Identify website’s weaknesses and prioritize: Not all components of your website need improving. And of those that need improving, not all need it now. Identify the weaknesses and shortcomings of your website and categorize them by urgency. Do not do everything. Prioritize.
Choose your benchmark: Choose the websites that you wish to evaluate. But how?
First you can do some homework listing y
our competitor sites; look at their marketing grade. Quickly look at the ones that outperform the rest and focus your efforts on those. From a purely website benchmarking standpoint, if you don’t find any role model here in this initial scouting, it’s probably safe to say that the whole benchmarking exercise won’t be useful and you’re probably better off focusing on the Design & Usability benchmarks against potentially non-competitor sites.
Second, if your goal has to do with improving ease switzerland whatsapp number data 5 million of use, usability and conversions you might want to make a second list including websites of other companies that target markets similar to yours (unless one of your competitors does a great job in this area as well). From this second list you can probably choose the ones that have a good and clear value proposition on their homepage, and you are able to know what they do within the first 5 seconds. I’ll venture to say that if they have this piece figured out, it is probably a candidate to spend some additional time looking into.
Finally, prepare a spreadsheet listing the criteria that you would like to evaluate. For the usability and conversion benchmark, you’ll need to take screenshots and write your critique based on the specific observations.
Screenshot of a benchmarking exercise
we did for an American telephone service provider creative director at crept rating agency utilizing a combination of Marketing Grader and Visualize.com
Screenshots of a Benchmarking exercise text services we did for an Online News Magazine. Some of the usability features benchmarked were overall look & feel ease of use, ease to browse through latest news and features that made it easy for users to consume content.
Start benchmarking: Compare and contrast your selected components with those of the selected website(s). Organize the collected information to facilitate analysis.
Prepare the highlights report: While your information is still fresh, prepare a highlights report of your exercise. What have you found out? are your competitors customer-focused? If yes, how can you differentiate? And if not, then it’s time to acknowledge the huge opportunity you have to increase your competitive edge by making your site more customer-centric. Use our benchmark reporting template to organize the information in a report in order to allow integration of the knowledge you have just gained in implementation.
