Google Trends for 3D CAD Companies: Whose Competing?

by Josh on June 23, 2008 · Comments

Last week on June 20th, Google Trends for websites was launched to allow a look into competing sites and aid your plans for worldwide domination. Similar sites, like Compete (my favorite) and Alexa already exist, but this leverages the power of Google’s simple, yet masterful use of analytical data.

Anyone can use it to find out the keyword or website competition for a site they want to start, but what’s really quite interesting is the competition going on in big industry. In our case, that would be… the industry.

If you take a look at Google Trends for the major 3D CAD/PLM companies in the world you can get a good idea of which are getting the most traffic. In the chart below, Autodesk (AutoCAD, Inventor) and Siemens(SolidEdge,NX) clearly come out ahead of 3DS(Catia, ) and PTC(Pro/E, CoCreate).

What’s does this show?
Now to be fair, it’s hard to gauge what /PLM products come out on top, because most products are under the main company domain. For example, AutoCAD is a sub-section on AutoDesk.com. is the only one that stands on its own, with it’s own domain. Even Catia.com leads back to the Dassault (3ds.com) website. Even though, this shows you where the traffic is going online and why online competition for keyword density and search engine result pages (SERPs) can even be important for vendors. Which, by the way, currently maintains the #1 SERP for 3D CAD. Goes to show you what search engine optimization (SEO) and backlinks can do for a company, but that’s a whole other mess.

Note: I also searched for SpaceClaim and Alibre’s ranking with these others. SpaceClaim does not show up and Alibre falls a fair bit below .com. You can get a better look at this and sites with smaller traffic on Compete.com.

Side-note:On a side note, according to Compete, SolidSmack.com passed Dassault (3ds.com) in daily/monthly Page Visits in April. That means absolutely nothing, since I’m not competing with Dassault for web presence and page views, but is kinda neat.

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Tagged as: autodesk, cad, plm, siemens, solidworks, trends

  • oleg
    this is wrong comparison in my view. you cannot compare siemens search popularity (really not related to PLM at all, since nobody think about siemens as PLM vendor only), ptc.com and autodesk. To have more fair comparison put autocad, solidworks, catia, pro-e (http://www.google.com/trends?q=solidworks%2C+ca...) and you will see different picture.
  • Josh
    Hey Oleg, thanks for bringing that up. I was interested mainly in just traffic to the site, because even though the domain names may not be associated with the product, the traffic that goes to the domain is part of what they offer.

    The NX/SolidEdge, Autocad and Catia all reside within Siemens, AutoDesk and Dassault, respectively. Therefore, what a company does as far as marketing and online search engine optimization go along way toward driving traffic toward that site. Which in turn is what Google Trends for website looks at.

    The Search trends reveal what has been fairly typical over the years. if you look at another set that includes autocad it matches the SERP's with exactness.

    Again, thanks for mentioning that because the search trends also go a long way to show the competitive advantage a company may have. See ya!
  • Fred
    Oleg's comparison was interesting, but I noticed Solid Edge was very low, likely because the word was concatenated. This is likely more accurate, http://www.google.com/trends?q=solidworks%2C+ca...
  • so is this like alexa? is the data accurate? what about mastercam
  • jonnie
    Interesting but I think meaningless.

    Most people using CADCAM products will already know the players - search engine traffic may have little to do with sales.

    Corporate users will not use search engines, they know the players and may buy 100s of seats at a time so big buyers but unlikely to show in these results. When I worked in the industry the big sales were to car manufacturers, aircraft manufacturers and so on - these people dont use search engines to find the websites, they know them off by heart already.

    Similarly it would be meaningless to count online articles or similar as a measure of who is talking about what - the employees of big customers do not usually vent steam on internet user groups - they talk direct to managerial level or similar of the relevevent company.

    Companies with hard to remember URLs often get googled although the person searching already knows the website, they just cant remember the URL.

    I would think that the trend for each company taken individually - ie whether they are falling over time or rising might be of some relevence but the comparison between companies seems weak to me.

    Also does not taken into account resellers - people may not be searching for the products but who sells them.

    Nope means nothing to me.

    Jon
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