Who else do your customers bank with and to whom do they compare your offers? Hitwise clickstream data can provide useful insight into a competitive set by looking at where customers go after leaving your site. Last week, nearly half (47%) of visits to Banks and Financial Institutions websites came from other Banks and Financial Institutions websites and 58% went to other sites in the same category. These figures may seem staggering but keep in mind, part of this is traffic moving among websites of the same brand (i.e. the main home page, banking and brokerage). However, much of that is also traffic coming from and going to competitive sites.
The amount of traffic going to and from competing sites varies dramatically from bank to bank. For example, most of BMO Financial Group Online Banking’s traffic goes to other BMO sites with 50% going to www.bmo.com last week. By comparison, CIBC Online Banking sends a much larger proportion of its traffic to non-CIBC websites, with only 3.7% going to CIBC Online Brokerage closely followed by TD Canada Trust Online Banking at 3.38% and RBC Online Bank at 2.6%.
I created a table of the top 10 downstream competitors from the big five banks. I used the online banking websites of the big five (online banking gets the most traffic). The downstream brands are listed, rather than individual URLs so that you can see the top 10 competing brands. In most cases, there were multiple websites for each brand (such as TD Canada Trust Online Banking and TD Waterhouse).

It is perhaps unsurprising to see TD Canada Trust at the top of the list across the board. I found it interesting that some regional differences seem to persist. In particular, notice Desjardins among the downstream brands from BMO and RBC. Other differences may be regional or may be a product of other demographic characteristics with for example, VanCity only showing up in CIBC’s clickstream and HSBC only showing up in RBC’s clickstream. It is also interesting that ING Direct Canada ranks ahead of BMO in downstream visits from RBC.
Who are your customers comparing your offers to? Which competitor sites are sending you the most traffic? Clickstream data can help firms better understand their competitor set.
We plan to post next week on TD Canada Trust’s promotion with Facebook. Stay tuned…
Update – the post on TD Canada Trust and Facebook is now live.