How to snoop your competitor's site usability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3343974

by wootish • 15 years ago

1 3 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There are paid services that let you study your site's usability via click-heatmapping. But how do you see if your competitors' layouts are doing good or not? OkShr.com is a service that acts like a URL shortener to the visitor but in the back-end is able to record all the clicks. These clicks are then transmitted in real-time to another URL privately shared with the creator over email. If you see there are more clicks on BUY on your rival's site than yours, then you know it is time to make those layout changes!

Check out the site at http://okshr.com. It's free. Your feedback much appreciated.

brk• 15 years ago

Neat idea, but how do you gather any data without actively sending customers to your competitors site?

It's like people are going to know about this shortened trojan URL without the creator of the URL publicizing and promoting it.

wootish2• 15 years ago

Thanks brk

What we do is we create a copy of the page's source code onto our database and showcase this code to the visitors. This means, although the user will be able to see click-heatmaps from the site, it will not affect the competitor in any way since the functionality of the page will not change in any way.

Also, at the end of 30 days, we stop tracking and will instead redirect the page to the end URL like any URL shortener. I have a feeling that 30 days could be a bit long. If it indeed turns out true, we can reduce that, or maybe provide this as an option to the URL creator.

wootish2• 15 years ago

Answering specific to your question about, "without actively sending customers to your competitors site?", I am not sure if we can get the visitor data from the organic visitors to the original site in any way. So, I guess, a little bit of third party promotion (say via Digg,Stumbleupon) will be required although you will be doing a favor to competition that way.