How to analyze the popularity of an Internet resource (or the situation with competitors in the economic sector)

 For marketers and sociologists, the analysis of the activities of economic (and other) subjects on the Internet becomes more and more relevant. For this, there are awesome tools that are not yet widely mastered.

So, imagine that the boss wants a report from the beautiful graphs on the activities of your company and competing companies. On the Internet (in real life, the tools are familiar to everyone). Let's analyze their activity with the help of available Internet-tools, from which you can not hide how things stand in the Internet representation of the company. The company's website is generally a magnificent illustration of its activities, showing the true significance for consumers and, what is especially useful, the dynamics of popularity among consumers. In addition, unlike the real, much less time is spent on technical analysis on the Internet. But we digress.

1. We take search engines, for example, all known google.com, but for process fans - a few different, for the subsequent comparison of results and the isolation of the required. We are looking for what is issued on the first pages of the search results for the keywords for the niche of interest to us (yes, for this we need to figure out which keywords correspond to our niche). These resources are not necessarily leading in the industry! Attention: these are resources that are good
invested in the so-called optimization (SEO - search engine optimization) and the experts well tuned the site so that it fell into the first position. It is not always those resources that really occupy the leading position in the industry. But they are interested in us, because a good advancement on the Internet raises attendance and, well, you understand, everything that follows.

2. We analyze the attendance of the resources we are interested in. To do this, go to http://www.alexa.com and drive in the domain of interest (and repeat this for domains of competitors in a niche). We get a graph of the dynamics (!) Attendance. That is, we also immediately see changes: the flow of visitors is growing or falling. A bunch of useful statistics
is issued, it is possible to pick and adjust, that it is necessary to deduce in the schedule. So we get the information purely by site traffic.

Attendance generally was long perceived as almost the only criterion for measuring user activity. The site visited means good. The second criterion was the actual purchase of the product in the online store - too obvious a factor (when it's too late to analyze what really happened, and you can only count the facts of purchases).

3. We look, what trace left the site on the Internet - the number of backlinks that other users put on it, telling about it to someone in different places on the Internet. We look, in other words, how the two-level communication model works on it. To do this, open http://ahrefs.com, drive in the domain of interest for analysis
(and then the remaining domains of interest). Here you can also compare the domains for user response.
So we get one more criterion for evaluation: the popularity of sites by links, i.e. how many times not just visited, but became interested and reached the response.

The second side of such popularity is technical: the number of backlinks strongly affects the rating of the site when it is issued in the search engines. The more links - the better for a site, the higher it is displayed in search results, the more it is clicked and, therefore, the more popular it becomes.

As a result, we get a bunch of useful and beautiful graphs. And then we compare the indicators and get our own intellectual product, which gives us valuable information, and also visually a good impression of the boss.

And of course, you can extend this scheme by searching and applying new and other similar programs. This is not all that can be done.

I believe that such an analysis, on which technical means are capable, is a very promising direction. We need to pay more attention to it. Firstly, more and more spheres go to the Internet, online stores are developing, and this activity must be somehow evaluated.

Secondly, the technical methods of research are developing, there are new services that are not customary to apply in sociology and marketing, but they can provide very useful information. Thirdly, such methods have significant advantages of mobility.

The undoubted advantages of analyzing technical tools on the Internet:

• the instantaneous cutoff (today's attendance, etc.);
• display of dynamics (instant information about the effect of campaigns, promotions, etc.) - allows you to quickly adjust the actions in the market;
• the impossibility to hide from the programs of the real situation the popularity of Internet resources (and its quality): we get uncomplicated information, the main thing is to interpret it correctly, understanding how the programs work.