White Papers
4 Proven Strategies for Digital Marketing Optimization
The key to any effective digital marketing strategy is having a thorough understanding of your potential customers’ paths to purchase and optimizing your marketing channels to maximize your ROI. This ebook focuses on four crucial areas of digital marketing and gives you the knowledge and tools you’ll need to support you on your journey to marketing optimization. Download now »
U.S. Auto Industry: 2012 in Review
2012 was a year of recovery for the US auto industry. Sales reached a post-recession high 14.4 million units, the best performance in 5 years and up 13% over 2011. At the same time Japanese manufacturers, reeling a year ago with post-tsunami inventory shortages came storming back to post 20%+ sales gains in 2012. Lastly, GM and Chrysler began to shed their bankruptcy status, with Chrysler especially posting solid sales gains on the success of multiple new products. In this special analysis, Compete, which operates a panel of 2 million +consumers online, investigates the key storylines that drove industry performance in 2012. The analysis leverages Compete’s proprietary in-market automotive shopper metrics, which are based on website visitation by unique consumers (i.e., no double counting of consumers doing the same shopping activity more than once in a month). Download now »
Is Subscribe & Save Working?
For many consumers, shopping online has become a convenience that’s hard to resist. The introduction of automatic replenishment programs, such as Amazon’s Subscribe & Save, has made online shopping even easier for consumers. These programs not only affect how consumers shop but also how marketers communicate with them. This report will highlight the current state of eRetailer auto replenishment programs, the categories most popular among users of the programs, and the impact of these programs on consumer behavior. Download now »
Improve Your Affiliate Marketing with Competitive Intelligence
Whether you’re running your affiliate program in house or through an affiliate marketing agency, it is critical to always be looking for new partnership opportunities that can help build trust for your brand and effectively sell your product. This report will demonstrate how you can leverage competitive intelligence to grow and improve your affiliate marketing program. Download now »
5 Things Every Marketer Should Know About The Consumers Path to Purchase
The path to purchase is the concept of how and where people shop and the best way to reach them. It’s important for marketers to understand their consumer’s path to purchase, because it allows us to engage them with the right message at the right time to impact their decision process. Download this report and we will highlight five things every marketer should know about their own shoppers. Download now »
Seeing Between the Lines...of the Search and the Click
Search marketing is an intense and competitive battlefield, and for those of us in the trenches it can feel like being dropped in an unknown location without a map or GPS to guide us. Download our free report to learn more about SERP and gain visibility into this competitive space. Download now »
3 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Ecommerce Strategy with Competitive Intelligence
Electronic commerce (ecommerce) is a rapidly growing business as an ever-increasing number of digitally savvy consumers spend more of their time and money online. This report will demonstrate how you can leverage competitive intelligence to launch or improve your ecommerce strategy. Download now »
Free Shipping: a Win-Win for Customers and Companies
This white paper will uncover just how important this benefit is to consumers by analyzing results from Compete’s Online Shopper Intelligence survey blended with insights from our clickstream data of more than 2 million U.S. consumers. This data offers a lens into how many consumers are using free shipping as well as the average order size for a top retailer whose free shipping strategy is one of the most well known in the industry. Download now »
The Online Impact of an Airline Merger
Over the past 50 years the airline industry has been plagued by low margins and concerns over fuel costs and ancillary revenue streams. In recent years, carrier consolidation has become the industry-accepted solution. However, consolidation can come with many challenges as consumers are forced to adopt different shopping habits. In this report, you will learn about the impact airline mergers have on site traffic, conversion, cross-shop behavior and post-merger customer retention. Download now »
How to Generate More Referral Traffic with Competitive Intelligence
Referral traffic can drive potential customers to your website while also providing you with the SEO benefits of inbound links. This report will demonstrate how you can leverage competitive intelligence to increase and improve your referral traffic and gain a competitive edge in your market. Download now »
Cruise Industry Demand and Conversion Insights
In recent years, the cruise industry has grown and has forecasted continued growth to come. This report provides insight into demand and conversion effectiveness of the cruise industry by quantifying the size of the online cruise market, traffic to key players’ websites and the rate at which cruise lines convert shoppers into bookers. Download now »
Optimize Your Search Marketing with Competitive Intelligence
Compete is constantly monitoring the search marketing landscape with our clients in mind. This report will demonstrate how to leverage seasonal and quarterly trends in search marketing and use competitive intelligence to help you achieve maximum ROI in your search campaigns. Download now »
How Agencies Are Growing Client Relationships with Competitive Intelligence
The Compete team maintains close relationships with our agency clients – many of the premier agencies in the world – and regularly keeps up on their best practices and industry trends. In this report, we’ll reveal how the top agencies are using competitive intelligence to develop and expand relationships with their clients, leading to longer engagements and more investment. Download now »
Four Steps to Growing Your Agency with Competitive Intelligence
The Compete team maintains close relationships with our agency clients – many of the premier agencies in the world – and regularly keeps up on their best practices and industry trends. In this report, we’ll reveal how the top agencies are using competitive intelligence to improve their new client prospecting and create more effective pitches, meaning more productivity and more new business. Download now »
Measuring the Flash Sale Travel Segment
Whether you've bought, redeemed, or neither, many people receive daily emails from travel flash sale sites like Groupon or LivingSocial enticing them to book a trip. This report measures the flash sale travel segment as a whole, the sites that are most popular in the space, and how these sites drive traffic. Download now »
Online Over-the-Top Solutions Today
This white paper will explore the growth in online Over-The-Top (OTT) solutions, looking at existing market players and the impact on telecom consumer behavior. As ownership of streaming enabled devices continues to grow, OTT consumption will rapidly increase. The growth in OTT viewing impacts many players, including networks (e.g.,NBC.com), TV service providers (e.g, Comcast), and stand-alone OTT providers (e.g.,Netflix). This paper will look at the evolving OTT landscape - including where, when and how consumers are engaging with online content - and examine the impact of TV service provider applications and OTT features on TV service shopping and customer behavior. Download now »
Which Brand Will be Crowned the "King of Luxury"?; Insights into 2012 Luxury Automobile Sales
Sales volumes to date reinforce that Mercedes-Benz and BMW will be in a tight race for the 2012 U.S. luxury-vehicle sales crown. Less clear is how Mercedes-Benz and BMW are driving sales, and how susceptible each brand is to losing sales to other rivals, such as Lexus. This white paper will provide an overview of the luxury car market for the first quarter of 2012 and includes an analysis of the six leading luxury brands in a head-to-head comparison of sales, shopper volume, competitive cross-shop and conversion. This analysis leverages Compete’s proprietary in-market automotive shopper metrics, which are based on unique consumers and Compete’s patented normalization process. Shopping behavior is based on consumers engagement with lower funnel activities (i.e., request a quote) on any of the 40+ third-party online automotive sites that Compete tracks. Download now »
Digital Trends: Consumer Behavior in Key Financial Sectors
This white paper provides an update on financial service (FS) consumer online behavior trends that occurred over the past year. We aim to provide you with a clear sense of what is currently going on in the online landscape by examining key metrics - derived from Compete's panel of two million consumers - to evaluate and benchmark how the industry is performing. Download now »
The State of Search: First Edition
For digital marketers, search marketing is consistently the biggest driver of ROI and you can’t afford to ignore trends in consumer behavior that will help you beat your competitors’ search efforts. Using insights gathered from Compete PRO data, we investigate the top three search engines, Bing, Google, and Yahoo, to see how consumer behavior is changing and what marketers can do with that knowledge. Download now »
The Impact of the Mobile Shopper
This whitepaper explores the continued evolution of the online shopper and the impact of the mobile shopper. Currently, consumers conduct 11% of their online shopping on mobile devices. As mobile phones and tablets become more prevalent, consumers will continue to shift their online shopping from PCs to mobile devices. Included in this whitepaper are some tips and recommendations to help retailers and brands prepare for the shift into m-commerce. Download now »
U.S. Auto Industry: 2011 in Review
2011 was a dynamic year for the U.S. automotive industry led by an increase in demand for new vehicles that resulted in a market-wide sales increase for the second consecutive year. At an OEM level we saw the continued rebound of General Motors and Chrysler Group post-bankruptcy as well as significant strides in market share by Hyundai, Kia and Volkswagen. At a segment level, elevated gas prices and a blitzkrieg of model launches drove interest in compact cars, particularly during the 1st half of the year. Lastly, at a model level, Leaf and Volt became household names and a slew of hybrid models debuted as OEMs continued to lessen the dependence on foreign oil in the midst of discussion over new federal MPG targets. Unfortunately, not all news was positive in 2011 as Japanese OEMs were dealt a devastating blow from the March earthquake and tsunami that severely impacted inventory and marketing efforts. Download now »
39 Twitter Quotes That Will Change Your Life
Ever since Twitter launched back in 2006, the way words have spread has never been the same. 140 character messages have impacted and influenced everything from pop songs, political revolutions, natural disasters and everything in between. Looking at Compete.com we can see that Twitter's popularity continues to rise and we don't think it's going anywhere but up. So sit back, read on and spread the word. But make sure it's 140 characters or less! Download now »
The Connection Project
Internet. Social. Mobile. These innovations are giving us the ability to understand and connect with customers in new and exciting ways and will drive marketing trends far into the future. So, how do you make these happen? How do you stay engaged with the connected digital consumer? How do you use data to increase your marketing success? How do you build brand loyalty and consumer trust through digital marketing? Download now »
Eight Steps to Blog Greatness
Build readership, awareness, and, ultimately, revenue through better blogging. Whether you’re new to blogging or want to polish your blogging skills, the steps in this book will help you achieve the results you seek. Download now »
Five Steps to Online Marketing Success Using Competitive Intelligence
How do you know what impact your marketing efforts are having on your competitors? What marketing channels are they using to acquire new users? What keywords are they bidding on or driving traffic through SEO? Competitive intelligence tools, like Compete PRO, can help you fully grasp your digital universe and develop a winning online marketing strategy. Download now »
Financial Services Mobile Series
Financial service account owners (bank, credit card, brokerage, or auto insurance) are now using mobile devices (Smartphone or tablet) to manage their accounts or conduct financial transactions more than ever. Through our quarterly survey of approximately 1,200 consumers we aim to understand how consumers are using their mobile devices. Compete Financial Services' Mobile Series is availble for free download.
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The State of Online Retail
The shift toward mass merchants and department stores and away from smaller specialty retailers continued in the second quarter of 2011. Consumers seem to value the convenience that these larger retailers offer over specialty retailers in categories such as electronics and sporting goods, as they are able to address all of their shopping needs at once. Download now »
The Evolution of the Compact Car Segment and the Role of Social Media
The Compact Car segment has undergone significant change over the past year. This whitepaper will take a look at what's going on and some of the influences that have driven this segment's evolution. This analysis utilizes Compete's panel of online consumers and its proprietary methodology for measuring online behaviors and new vehicle shopping patterns based on unique shoppers. Download now »