After 12 weeks of hard work, we’re excited to share the first iteration of KPICrunch, our platform to identify & analyse competitive landscapes
A few months ago, as part of another venture, we started conducting due diligence on potential content site acquisitions. We were frustrated by the persistent poor quality of the digital properties we came across. We also did some post-mortem analysis on samples of “successful” transactions managed by leading marketplaces and came to similar conclusions: a lot of the sites had lost substantial traffic (and value) since their transfer.
Our due diligence workflow consisted of multiple tools: ahrefs, semrush, alexa, similarweb,… mainly focused on SEO / traffic data. We also used Socialblade to get a sense of the social media footprint of some properties (we didn’t have the money to use Quintly and the likes) but the process proved to be quite cumbersome: we had to know the exact social media handle of the targeted properties to get the high-level KPIs for each channel.
The experience was very fragmented, we didn’t have a quick holistic view integrating a domain into its competitive landscape, which was also a crucial point in our thinking process: not only did we want to assess the intrinsic health of the domain from an SEO perspective, we also wanted to get a sense of its broader digital footprint and find out where it stood in relation to its direct competitors. There were some enterprise offerings but they were both very expensive and not adapted to our use case.
So we decided to build our own tool to get a quick snapshot of any digital competitive landscape, either from a single “seeding” URL or from a ready-made list of domains.
Our primary goal was to integrate into a single view:
- high-level social media KPIs from the leading networks,
- historical SEO data (organic traffic today vs 1 year ago + keyword yield, leveraging SERStat API),
- the size of the site (the number of indexed pages),
- its ranking at a macro level (based on the Open Page Rank data, which gives a good indication of the authority of a website in the global ecosystem of 200+ million active sites),
- a snapshot of Competitive Traffic Share (Traffic Distribution),
- the favicon + site title + meta description,
- and, in the future, a bunch of other relevant quantitative & qualitative data elements via in-house developments and third-party integrations.
We’re proud to announce that, after 12 weeks of hard work, our homemade platform, KPICrunch, is fully operational behind the scenes and we’re looking forward to opening it to the public on June 1st, 2022.
It all looks pretty simple on the surface — we wanted to offer a clean UI — but we can assure you that there’s some heavy lifting taking place in the background in terms of data sourcing and processing. To give you an idea of our current efficiency, the tool manages to analyse 100 domains in a few minutes, retrieving 62 live data points per domain while computing a series of domain-level and landscape-level ratios. It’s quite satisfying to see it in action ;-)
In the meantime, eating our own dog food, we’ve started curating some competitive landscapes to demonstrate what the users will be able to get from the platform. The feed of our latest in-house reports is available on https://kpicrunch.com. Each report can be shared, downloaded as a CSV or even embedded on a third-party website. We think this will be a valuable source of information for data-driven tech/business journalism. You can already sign up for our waiting list to get free early access to the platform.
It’s only the beginning of a long story.
The endgame for KPICrunch won’t be limited to a static data snapshot of a moment in time.
Our goal is not to compete with ahrefs, SEMRush, Similarweb and the likes. Our ambition is to build a productivity tool aimed at competitive intelligence, which you’ll be able to use in your daily practice to conduct your competitive research. It will be natively integrated with a selection of data sources, feature a range of heuristic plugins and a set of collaboration tools.
In Q4 2022, we will be introducing historical recording of data, enabling you to follow the evolution of a competitive landscape over time. You will also be able to compare the evolution of different landscapes, in the same vertical or in different verticals, to capture the pulse of market dynamics.
Our next iterations will include predictive analytics and, finally, we’ll move beyond quantitative data and offer a qualitative report for each landscape, based on AI-powered visual and semantic analysis. Our ultimate ambition is to develop a prescriptive tool offering actionable/measurable creative insights to either launch a venture in a specific landscape or improve the KPIs of an existing property.
We believe that our tool will be useful for:
- SMBs looking for affordable competitive intelligence data to inform their marketing & sales efforts
- Buyers, investors and fintech players looking for holistic data to conduct their due diligence process
- Journalists looking for embeddable data to enrich their articles
- Students looking for data to inform their research
- Governments and other institutions looking for data to guide and document their policies
Our vision is to democratize and demystify access to competitive research.
As said before, we plan to integrate with existing alternative data providers to enrich the KPIs provided by our in-house application. Users will be able to securely authenticate with leading data providers, as easily as they would connect an app to Zapier or Integromat, and our platform will take care of data reconciliation and normalization, to provide an instantly enriched holistic report. A kind of Snowflake-like approach focused on Competitive Intelligence use cases.
We’re convinced that alternative data crunching will be increasingly part of everyone’s daily workflow.
We hope that you’ll love what we’ve developed so far and can’t wait to welcome you onboard from June 1st.
Discover our in-house demo reports and join the waiting list on kpicrunch.com.
Join our Discord Server on https://discord.gg/A6pejsJ6
Join our Subreddit on https://www.reddit.com/r/kpicrunch/
PS: before we open the tool to the public, if you’d like us to analyse a specific competitive landscape, please send us an email to contact@kpicrunch.com with the list of domains + a title for the research (max 25 URLs per sample). We’ll create a free report and share it on our site.