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How to benchmark my website against competitors?

Dimitris Raptis
June 25th, 2020 · 2 min read

Competitive benchmarking is the process of comparing your company against a number of competitors using a set collection of metrics. This is used to measure the performance of a company and compare it to others over time.

When the comparing metric is the appearance of your website/app/landing page, VisualEyes provides actual assistance. Comparing your product against competitions is easier than ever for both live and offline work.

The best approach is to analyze your performance by utilizing the VisualEyes Clarity Score metric. Clarity score reveals how clear and aesthetically pleasing is your website. Repetitive UX studies indicate that users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. That’s why is highly important to score better than your competitor.

Thus, the goal of your analysis is to find out how more (or less) appealing your website is compared to your competitor. The optimal scenario is to have a Clarity score larger than your competition.

Keep in mind that in most cases huge (score-wise) improvements aren't realistic, so even a 2-5 points of difference is a win!

Example Case

For our example, we are going to examine the landing page of the largest airline companies around the world. The assumption is that our client/company is Ryanair, an Irish budget airline founded in 1984, and want to benchmark against their top competitors.

Ryanair has a notorious distractive user interface that many times confuse visitors. The first step is to analyze the above the fold view of Ryanair’s landing page using the VisualEyes app. The clarity analysis assigns a low score for our website. However, this score alone is not worth much.

Frame 5

That’s why we have to perform a more extensive analysis and repeat the process for the whole pool of our competitors. More specifically, we selected as competitors some of the top-performing airlines around the globe. For example, American Airlines, Emirates, Lufthansa, Delta, Iberia, and Qatar Airways.

By specifying the clarity score of the competitors, you can safely come to the conclusion that the optimal score range for your design category is somewhere between 65 and 82. Most possible, a score around 75 would be a perfect positioning.

Therefore, a couple of UI (or UX) adjustments are required to fine-tune the visual appearance of the website and dilate the conversion funnel.

How to perform the analysis with VisualEyes

VisualEyes’ Chrome plugin is designed to capture and analyze live websites instantly. Navigate to your desired website and enable the Chrome extension. It offers 3 screenshot types that support nearly every possible case.

  1. Capture Visible Part of the Screen: This mode takes a screenshot of the current view of your browser window (without the bookmarks/URL bars)
  2. Capture Selected Area: You are able to define an area in your screen by dragging and dropping the mouse cursor and then the analysis is applied to this area.
  3. Capture Entire Page: It means that the screenshot process scrolls and includes the entire website.

For testing landing pages that haven’t been in production yet (design stage), the best approach is to use either the VisualEyes’ platform or our design plugins (for Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD) and upload the design.

👇 The VisualEyes’ example project 👇 (or open in a new tab)

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