A critical issue with the Internet is that businesses and individuals can make changes instantly. This 24 hour nature means that it’s incredibly difficult to monitor all of the many moving parts of your competitors sites. From simple copy changes, on-site optimisation projects, or broadening of product ranges, there can be a comprehensive array of changes going on at any one time. Some of these changes could be game-changing and threaten your business.
Conversion optimisation came on leaps and bounds in 2013. Not only did many industry leaders begin discussing CRO tactics more, but many digital marketing agencies began offering these services too. Many businesses in the mainstream have quickly learned that investment in some digital marketing channels are hard to measure ROI on. Social media and content creation are good examples of this, proving difficulties understanding ROI without a comprehensive and informed measurement process.
Understandably, this can frustrate business-owners trying to make their marketing budgets go as far as possible. Conversion rate optimisation on the other hand is all about increasing ROI. Tactics such as A/B split and multivariate testing aimed at increasing conversions is a scientific and accurate way of increasing your ROI from your online assets.
How Do You Know if your Competitor is Running Optimisation Tests?
Herein lies the problem, inevitably raising the question how do you know if your competitors are running conversion optimisation tests? That is, beyond tracking down your competitors developer and bribing him or bugging their offices. Understanding whether your competitors are running A/B or multivariate split tests can benefit you in a number of ways, chiefly allowing you to see what aspects on their site they are testing, perhaps to inspire areas that you could test yourself? Knowing this, wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool to help you monitor this? Enter CROMonitor, a new product developed by Yousaf Sekander (Director at RocketMill and creator of Social Crawlytics, a great tool that we previously featured in StateofDigital).
What CROMonitor Does
CROMonitor allows you to track your competitors (or sites that inspire you) and send you reports when changes have been made. It does this by taking screenshots from a variety of IP address at scheduled intervals, it then compares these to each other and notifies you when changes have been made. By default CROMonitor allows:
- Up to 3 different ‘watchlists’
- 2 URLs on each
- Up to 200MB of storage
How to Set Up A/B Split Testing & Multi-Variate Testing with CROMonitor
CROMonitor is very easy to use, simply go to the site, sign up and you’re off! You can then create a ‘watchlist’, in which you can add unique URLs that you want to monitor for changes: One nice feature is that you can change the percentage change threshold of site changes, allowing you to restrict the noise of very minor site changes. CROMonitor will then email you on the intervals that you’ve requested it check for changes, reporting the percentage of change that can be seen in the page you’ve set up to track: CROMonitor is fully responsive, designed so that CROMonitor works on whatever device you use to access it, desktop, tablet or mobile. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when loaded on my mobile screen:
Test Examples
At the time of writing this article I contacted CROMonitor creator Yousaf Sekander and he kindly provided me some examples of tests that he has run using the tools, you can see these below:
Summary
- Have you discovered software like CROMonitor out there?
- Are there any tools that you believe would compliment using CROMonitor?
- What uses could you find for CROMonitor for?