This is how I like to check in on my competitors

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The other day I was having a conversation with a vendor and they asked me who I thought my biggest competitors are. That made me think -- what do we means when we say that?

Biggest in terms of competitive features?

Biggest in terms of users?

Biggest in terms of website traffic?

Well, all of those, I guess, but I always think comparing traffic and SEO performance between companies is pretty telling. You can determine the maturity of a company. You can look into where a company is prioritizing their marketing. And most of all, for marketers, you can tell how much emphasis your competitors put toward acquisition marketing rather than waiting for organic growth.

Today we’re going to humour my inner marketing nerd and do something I do sometimes when I’m bored -- we’re going to tap into SEMrush, my favorite SEO tool, to dig into a few different categories of competing brands to see what we can learn. We’ll see an estimate of global traffic to each website, their rough breakdown of traffic sources, and traffic trends over the last six months.

SEO tools provide a lot of interesting anecdotal data, especially if you can provide the context. It’s a skill I always recommend marketers try to learn a bit of. You can intuit quite a bit about a market this way.

NFT Marketplaces

Ok so this is a cool one. NFTs are one of the most prominent things to have come out of the current crypto market cycle. I chose OpenSea, Rarible, and SuperRare as our platforms to focus on for this section. What is there to learn here?

• All three brands were more or less neck and neck back in Q4, but as the markets started to take off in December, traffic began to take off across the category.

• OpenSea has emerged as the market leader in terms of overall traffic.

• On top of that, OpenSea receives the most Direct, Referral, Search, and Social traffic of the bunch.

• Last but not least, OpenSea and Rarible are the only ones dipping toes into paid search as an acquisition channel (though it’s hard to see it in the above graphic).

This is an emerging category with some companies that are still dealing with scaling for their new inflow of customers.

I think it’s important to also contextualize this class against, say, NBA Top Shot, who has significantly overtaken the rest of the class due to their more mainstream appeal and adoption. Even my crypto-skeptic friends have been buying up Top Shot decks for speculation. Remarkable.

Centralized Lending Platforms

The idea of earning crypto didn’t really exist for consumers until about mid-2019 when brands like BlockFi, Celsius, and Nexo began to hit their stride. Remember, this was during Crypto Winter. Asset prices were significantly deflated, as was moral of the wider community. Then COVID hit and markets came back to life. At the same time, interest rates were dropping, meaning consumer fintech interest rates on savings accounts were, too. All of a sudden 6% on Bitcoin or 8% on stablecoins (compared to 0.01% on USD) seemed like a dream. And these platforms took off.

But what can we learn from the data above?

• BlockFi just edges out Nexo for global traffic volume

• Celsius traffic is about one-sixth of the other two platforms

• Nexo traditionally lead the group for overall traffic, but BlockFi caught up quickly starting in January and overtook the pack

• BlockFi leads the category in Direct, Search and Social traffic

• Nexo leads in both Referral and Paid Search traffic

Some interesting implications here. What we’re seeing is Nexo, more or less owns the European market and launched before the rest, has been caught up to by BlockFi. BlockFi has invested heavily in the US market in all of brand marketing and SEO, making them (according to this data) the most easily found on search engines.

It’s also worth pointing out that Celsius is a token project. Despite that built-in community of HOLDers, the centralized platforms have significantly overtaken them during this market cycle (and apparently before).

Pretty cool.

Trading Platforms

Ok, last but not least we’re going to look at some of the popular trading platforms and how their global traffic stacks up against each other. By now you’ve noticed a theme here where all of the companies we’ve discussed have gone through a massive growth period during this bull run. There’s been a ton of news about platforms and their customer service teams buckling under the weight of the new wave of crypto investors.

But how do those companies acquire those customers and where does their traffic come from? Let’s take a look here and see what we can learn:

• Binance currently leads the group, overtaking Coinbase in January after running neck and neck the quarter before. Remember, Coinbase mainly operates in the US (with some availability in other countries), but Binance is a global company.

• Coinbase and Binance direct traffic is through the roof, with eToro direct traffic close behind.

• eToro leads the back in referral traffic. Take it from me, eToro is an acquisition machine and invests in affiliate marketing significantly heavier than the other companies in this group. It’s also worth noting that eToro is the only company in this example that is both a crypto trading platform and a stock trading platform globally.

• Binance and Coinbase are also the most visible on organic search

So what we can see here is two titans of crypto fighting for supremacy, followed closely by a multi-asset brokerage. Comparing Binance and Coinbase in this context really emphasizes how much more of a titan that company will be once it truly expands into global markets that companies like Binance currently dominate.

Something to keep an eye on.

Who’s Hiring Marketers in Crypto? Me. I am hiring.

• Brand Marketing Manager @ eToro US [APPLY]

• AUM Marketing Manager @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Email Marketing Lead @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Social Media Lead @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Copywriter @ eToro US [APPLY]

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