Competitive intelligence acquisition from websites

Competitive intelligence (CI) acquisition is an important way for enterprise to participate the fierce market competition in the information age. However, only webpages are used as the CI collection sources in previous studies while the websites factors are ignored. In fact, there is much key information in competitors' websites. In this paper, the CI factors possessed by the websites including website's rank, website's age, PageRank, IP-visit, PV Value, Backlinks, Response Time and Search Engine Visibility are analyzed. Then the corresponding CI information acquisition process and tools are studied. Case studies on two typical groups of Chinese e-commerce websites are presented respectively. Results suggest that CI information acquisition from websites is an effective way for enterprise to find its own and competitors' strengths and weaknesses, which has a great help for enterprise to adjust its market competition policies and obtain strategic advantage.