Compliance Standards, ITAD's research and advisory firm, has shared the first edition of the ITAD Marketing Leadership Tracker. | Nico El Nino/Shutterstock
Which processors have the most aggressive marketing campaigns? Who gets the most traffic from search engine results? How are site visits across the ITAD industry? Analyzing compliance standards has the answer.
The Boston-based ITAD research and advisory firm on March 14 released the first edition of its regular update of marketing results for the ITAD industry, according to principal analyst David Dowd. The report, titled ITAD Marketing Leadership Tracker, provides “monthly statistics on how the IT asset disposal and e-recycling sector is evolving from the perspective of online stakeholders and the performance of ITAD vendors.” He said he would provide it.
Dowd said in an interview that the idea for the report came from an interest in finding more data sources to evaluate the ITAD sector. Compliance standards often examine companies directly, but also examine employee-generated data that shows how employees view the workplace. But Dowd says these metrics don't tell the whole story.
What remains, he said, is internet activity, specifically data provided by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, as well as other data giants such as Facebook. These provide information such as how often the site is visited, who accessed it and how.
“For me, it’s the holy grail,” Dowd said. “Here we have raw information, unfiltered, unfiltered, unfiltered by PR and communications teams, unmassaged by marketing departments, providing visibility.”
Reports are published monthly.
ITAD Marketing Snapshot
Compliance Standards buys traffic information from big data sources and delivers it to you through an aggregator, so you can filter it by company to the metrics you need.
“That data goes through a funnel where you get all kinds of different views,” Daoud explained.
In its first edition, covering January 2024, the report analyzed web traffic for 18 companies primarily focused on ITAD services and examined general trends across the industry. The report excludes what Dowd calls “non-pure business” companies. He identified these companies as providing ITAD services, but representing only a small portion of the business in terms of revenue. Some examples are Iron Mountain, CDW, Insight, and SHI.
In addition to being ITAD-specific, the 18 companies selected were those that generated sufficient traffic data to perform the analysis. The analysis also does not take into account OEMs, which “will be subject to separate review,” the report notes.
The Compliance Standards Report shares the total amount of traffic to all ITAD websites (approximately 248,000 site visits) and examines how users access these websites.
In January, organic search, which means users search for ITAD services on a search engine and find a company's website, accounted for 38% of traffic. Direct traffic, that is, traffic in which users typed the address of the company's website in their browser without using a search engine, accounted for an additional 31%. Paid search, or ads that pay to appear in search results, accounted for less than 1% of traffic.
Compliance Standards also ranked ITAD companies by number of site visits.
ERI was one of the largest processors in the US, receiving 41% of all traffic from 18 companies, according to the report. Dowd reports that ERI's traffic has increased by nearly 800% compared to just a month ago, which he attributes to a “continued aggressive marketing campaign.” Masu. In second place he was chosen in January, he accounted for 38% of the total traffic generated across 18 companies.
Sector impact
In its first report, Compliance Standards suggests how to use traffic data to analyze industry trends. “Reflecting the volatile nature of the sector and lack of clear leadership, preliminary data shows a contraction in traffic in February 2024, with traffic estimated to be: 19.6% month-over-month, evidence of a decline in marketing activity.
Dowd told E-Scrap News that he has already observed ups and downs in traffic while analyzing data over the past few months. This suggests that while some specific companies' marketing efforts may drive short-term traffic, “there is still no clear standard in this industry on how to maintain momentum.” He said that it shows.
This data also reflects how different priorities overlap in the public's mind, and that information can benefit ITAD's marketing efforts. The number of people searching for “ITAD” around the world was a fraction of the number of people searching for “ESG,” which refers to environment, social and governance, which is a common sustainability reporting indicator for major companies. That may not be surprising. Knowing what people are searching for helps guide ITAD's marketing, Dowd said.
“It shows you where your heart and mind is,” he said.
