specialized content category. These quantitative and qualitative data points give you the ability to measure, score, and identify best practices versus lame practices. When you benchmark direct competitors, you want to find a competitive parity among their products. You’re looking for a baseline that defines the bottom-line criteria that future customers will expect when your team delivers on the value proposition. Do customers expect that a product detail page will have photos, videos, and reviews? Does the most popular site have the most merchandise and/or the widest selection? Does the company behind the most innovative and downloaded app have lots of funding? When you benchmark the indirect competitors, you’re analyzing how these digital products offer alternative ways to solve a problem. For example, in the Busy Man’s Shopping Site competitive analysis, I benchmarked the monthly traffic of the indirect competitors. The website Gilt had monthly traffic of 1.8 million users, but Fab — a direct competitor of Gilt — only had 380,000 users. This data point really seemed important to me because it made me wonder: why was the disparity between their monthly traffic so huge? What was Gilt doing better? You are looking for trends, patterns, gaps, and an overall sense of the look of the landscape. Often, you will notice common patterns being repeated across many sites within a vertical market. You might wonder why they’re all broken in the same way. You might realize that they are all overlooking an especially useful capability that could be the secret sauce you use in your value innovation. (See Chapter 6 for more.) Are most of the losers missing on content, traffic, stickiness, personalization, a bad browse or search experience? Determine the causes. By benchmarking the competition, you’ll find opportunities to create value by either innovating or optimizing on the best UX and business model practices of other competing products. You’ll also want to extract these golden nuggets as recommendations to put in your brief. The analysis column of each competitor The reason you waited until now to do the analysis column in the Competitive Analysis Matrix template is that you needed to collect as much data as possible about the entire competitive landscape of your value proposition. But now, you’re finally ready to fill it out. At this point, you should see nuances among competitors. You’ve benchmarked attributes. You can gauge which competitors are a success or failure. You can say