Win the Market Race: 5 Pictorial Depictions of Building a Competitive Analysis App
Introduction
This article delves into the development process of a competitive analysis application by offering five visualization scenario examples, each representing a different stage of the project. The application aims to monitor competition and analyze their sales strategy, helping sales managers, business analysts, and market researchers make informed decisions. These scenarios equip readers with insights into the objectives, settings, characters, and actions required at each development phase, outlining potential challenges and goals during the journey.
5 Visualization Scenarios Exploring Competitive Analysis App Development
Competitor Data Collection
- Objective: Define and set up the web scraping methods for competitor data collection.
- Setting: Brainstorming and collaborative coding sessions between Python developers.
- Characters: Two Python developers with expertise in Beautiful Soup for web scraping.
- Actions: Identifying key competitor websites and pages, designing and running scraping scripts.
- Challenges: Dealing with website restrictions against scraping, and ensuring data completeness.
- Goals: A scalable web scraping setup ready to collect comprehensive competitor data.
- Variables: Changes in website structures rendering scripts inefficient, legal issues around data scraping.
Data Cleaning and Transformation
- Objective: Prepare the scraped data for analysis.
- Setting: Developers team up to cleanse, transform, and standardize the collected data.
- Characters: Python developers proficient in Pandas and NumPy libraries.
- Actions: Cleaning null values, duplicates, and irrelevant data; standardizing formats; transforming data types.
- Challenges: Dealing with large volumes of data, and handling complex transformation scenarios.
- Goals: Clean, standardized, and ready-to-use competitor data.
- Variables: Source data changes that might require updating the cleaning process, and potential loss of important data during cleaning.
Competitive Analysis Model Development
- Objective: Develop a strategic analysis module in the application.
- Setting: Python developers and a business analyst working on deriving meaningful insights from the competitor data.
- Characters: Python developers cooperating with a business analyst to develop the analysis logic.
- Actions: Designing relevant KPIs, and implementing the logic for the strategic analysis module.
- Challenges: Determining relevant KPIs, and translating business analysis logic into code.
- Goals: An algorithmic model ready to perform automated strategic analysis based on the collected competitor data.
- Variables: Change in competitive strategies leading to changes in analysis logic.
Notification System Development
- Objective: Develop a notification system for alerting significant changes in the competitors' strategies.
- Setting: Python developers create an alert module as per the business analyst's suggestions.
- Characters: Two Python developers, integrating the notification module with the strategic analysis module.
- Actions: Setting up conditions for notifying users, and ensuring regular checking of those conditions.
- Challenges: Determining what constitutes a significant change, ensuring prompt and accurate alert system.
- Goals: A notification system that alerts users about important changes in the competitive landscape.
- Variables: Failing to identify crucial changes, alerting users about insignificant updates.
System Testing and Deployment
- Objective: Confirm the correct functioning of data gathering, analysis, and alert systems.
- Setting: QA tester running through various test cases, debugging, and final deployment of the app.
- Characters: QA tester experienced in testing data-centric applications with the Python developers to fix the bugs.
- Actions: Carrying out planned test cases, patching the issues found, re-testing, and finally deploying the app.
- Challenges: Discovering hidden bugs, validating data and analysis results, and ensuring a seamless alerting mechanism.
- Goals: An error-free, smoothly functioning system providing insightful competitive analysis.
- Variables: Unnoticed bugs, and changes in data source structures causing scraping issues.
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