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Introduction to Free Competitor Analysis Tools
There are several free competitor analysis tools that you can use to get a better understanding of your competitors and their marketing strategies. This information will help you to better position your own products and services and develop a more effective marketing plan.
The first tool is Google Alerts, which allows you to set up alerts for specific keywords or phrases. When someone uses those terms, you’ll receive an email from Google with links to any articles that mention those terms. This is a great way to find out what people are talking about when they mention your competitors’ names.
Another good tool is Buzzsumo, which allows you to search for articles that have been shared on social media. You can also see how many times each article has been shared, as well as the number of social media accounts that have shared it. The data comes from Facebook and Twitter, so it’s limited in scope but still useful when used properly.
Effective Free Competitor Analysis Tools
It can be hard to find completely free online competitor analysis tools you can use effectively. However, there are digital marketing analytics tools that are a gold mine for insights and research on competitors at no cost.
We collected a list of the best online software solutions for market analysis and research such as :
free social media competitor analysis tools;
free website, keyword, backlink, and SEO competitor analysis tools;
free PPC competitive analysis software;
website change checkers and others
Today, it is absolutely critical to ensure you’re monitoring your competitors on a daily basis and updating your view of the market shifts.
we are focused on what are the benefits of competitive research and analysis and how to do it effectively.
Here, we will show you the top 25 costless online tools you can use freely to spy your competitors, spot new market trends, and find out what’s working within your niche.
Some of the tools are free by nature and others provide a completely free account with a comprehensive range of free features.
- Crayon Intel Free (free market intelligence tool that monitor competitor’s content and design changes)
Crayon Intel Free screen shot – one of the best free online competitor analysis tools
This great marketing intelligence tool can help you track, analyze, and act on many things that happen outside of your business.
With Crayon Intel Free you can monitor seamlessly the content and design changes from your competitors.
You can have a collection of competitors, track inspirational brands, get daily email digests, and get a comprehensive view of your competitors’ moves.
Crayon Intel Free is completely free to use, and you can track any number of companies.
Free options: only free account
- Talkwalker’s Free Social Search (free social media competitor analysis tool)
Talkwalker’s Free Social Search
Do you want to know what social media strategies are your competitors pursuing? You can get the answer for free by Talkwalker’s Free Social Search.
This is a great real-time free social media search engine that can provide you with unlimited searches across all major social networks.
You can get an instant overview of your competitors’ social media campaigns. The tool shows you who’s talking about you and your competitors with live audience insights.
And the best thing is that you can enjoy unlimited real-time data.
Free options: only free
- SiteAlerts (free keyword, social media, and website competitor analysis tool)
SiteAlerts – competitor monitoring software screen shot
This is one of the most easiest to use and completely free online competitor analysis tools that answer many questions such as:
How much traffic do your competitors get? Where does the traffic come from? What software tools do they use? What keywords do they rank for? Is social media working for them?
SiteAlerts is a simple but very useful keyword, social media, and website competitor analysis tool that will provide you with a lot of marketing stats about your competitors as well as the technology they use.
Free options: a free account with a good range of features and paid accounts
- VisualPing (free website change checker)
VisualPing – free online website checker screen shot
Do you want to monitor seamlessly your competitor’s websites changes at no cost? If so, VisualPing can be your solution.
It get you notified on each visual change of a website or website area.
Thus, you can be alerted every time when your competitor update prices, publish news or other important information to users.
Visualping is one of the most easiest to use free website change checkers.
Free options: free account with 62 checks/month and premium accounts
- WhatRuns (discover what technology drives your competitor’s website at no cost)
WhatRuns is a free technology lookup tool that will show you what technologies are used on any website.
Actually, this is a free browser extension that shows you the technologies used on your rival’s website at the click of a button.
WhatRuns shows you almost everything that a website has. Web apps they pay for, CDN they’re hosted on, WordPress plugins, fonts – and much more info!
Also, the tool notifies you when a website starts or stop using a technology.
Free options: only free
- Rank Signals (free keyword, backlink, and SEO competitor analysis tool)
Rank Signals – keyword, backlink and SEO competitor analysis tool
Rank Signals is one of the greatest free online competitor analysis tools that allows you to discover SEO backlinks and traffic sources of your competitors.
You might know how important backlinks are for a good SEO strategy.
Rank Signal helps you identify your competitors best links and evaluate the quality and value of the links.
If you searching for a solid basis for a link building strategy, don’t hesitate to use this tool.
Free options: only free
- Moat (free tool for analyzing your competitors’ ad creative)
Moat – free online tool for analyzing your competitors ad creative
Moat is an awesome free online marketing analysis tool that act as digital-ad search engine. It shows you the competitor’s ad creative and campaigns.
Simply type in the online field a brand and you will see the ads that they are using.
It also displays the dimensions of the ad and the dates during which the ad was (is) active.
You can follow your competitors’ brands and get notified every time they publish a new ad.
Free options: a free account that work great and a PRO oprion
- SimilarWeb (free online tool for analyzing your competitor’s web rankings)
SimilarWeb – a free online tool for analyzing your competitor’s web rankings
This is one of the most comprehensive free online competitor analysis tools when it comes to traffic insights for any website.
Just type a website in the online field and instantly you’ll get global rank, country rank, and category rank of that website.
You also will see nice graphs that show the traffic sources, top 5 organic keywords of your competitor’s website, the leads from social media channels, audience Interests, and much more.
SimilarWeb lets you add competitors and even gives you suggestions on who you may want to follow and watch.
Free options: a free account with a good range of features and paid accounts
- Feedly (free news aggregator site for tracking competitors’ news and mentions)
Feedly – free online news aggregator site
Feedly is a news aggregator site that can work greatly as one of the free online competitor analysis tools.
It’s one of the easiest ways for checking your competitors’ new posts without bouncing all over the web. You won’t miss a beat from your competitors’ news and mentions.
With Feedly you are able to monitor easily news about your competitors’ products, services, posts, content, Tweets or even YouTube videos.
You can create a collection for a given topic – news, competitors, etc. – and put all the sites you currently read into the list.
Moreover, Feedly also recommends other similar and related sites based on the your collection content.
Free options: a free version that will keep you up to date with content and a paid account
- Open Link Profiler (free SEO and backlink competitor analysis tool)
Open Link Profiler – a free SEO and backlink competitor analysis tool
OpenLinkProfiler.org is an awsome free online SEO and backlink competitor analysis tool that enables you to check the backlinks of any website.
You get an immediate link analysis of any website you want. You can export 1,000 links per website for free (more in paid versions).
You can also use a Link Manager for free and get notifications about new links by email.
Open Link Profiler is an online marketing analytics software tool that works great for those who aim to get higher rankings on search engines such as Google and Bing.
Free options: a free account that allows you to export 1000 links per website and premium versions
- Website Grader (a free online website competitor analysis tool)
Website Grader from Hubspot is a very cool tool that will provide you with instant insights on your competitors’ overall score based on website’s performance and SEO activity.
The tool also give you information about how well-optimised is your competitor’s websites for mobile.
You can also see how good are your competitor websites’ page titles, headings, and meta descriptions.
Free options: only free to use
- BuiltWith (a free website profiler for insights on your competitor’s marketing strategies)
BuiltWith – a free website profiler for insights on your competitor’s marketing strategies
BuiltWith is one of the best free online competitor analysis tools that provides technology information for any website you want to check.
It helps you find out what technology are used for building your competitor’s website, in order to get leads, marketing intelligence, and analysis.
Fill in a competitor’s website and instantly see what software systems they use. This gives you powerful insights on their marketing strategies.
BuiltWith answer questions such as: “What content management system are your competitors using?”, “What are they tracking?”, “What plugins are installed on their website?”
Free options: BuiltWith is completely free to use for individual site lookups.
- Majestic (free backlink and SEO competitor analysis tool)
Majestic is an online SEO competitor analysis tool that specializes in backlinks. It provides you with a depth of backlink data for your competitor’s website.
Majestic is a very easy to setup web-based software. First, you need to register for a free account to get the insights.
After logging in, you can begin using Majestic immediately.
The free version will show you information about the number of links to your competitor’s URL, the number of of links to the domain, the number of domains that link to the URL and to the domain, Citation Flow, Trust Flow, a link profile graph of the citation flow and trust flow, timeline charts, and other.
Free options: free account with a great range of features
- Searchmetrics (free SEO, content marketing, and PPC compatitor analysis tool)
Searchmetrics is one of the most powerful free online competitor analysis tools with a lot of functions and options.
It is a web-based SEO and content marketing software solution to help you improve your online presence and research your competitors.
It’s quite easy to jump in and see a lot of types of data for any website you need.
With a free account you can see a lot of SEO data for your competitors such as the top keywords their websites are ranking for, organic vs paid keywords, users by locations, market analysis including your top organic competitors, and more.
Reports are absolutely easy to understand and include PPC competitive analysis and social media competition.
Free options: free account with powerful features and paid versions
- SpyFu (free SEO and keyword competitor analysis tool)
When it comes to the most popular free online competitor analysis tools, SpyFu is on the top places and will impress you with its depth and wealth of features.
SpyFu is an SEO tool that allows you to gain a deep insight on your competitor’s keyword campaign.
Its options include keyword spy tools, PPC competitor monitoring, keyword grouper, competitor shared keywords, and much more.
Except keywords, Spyfu also seamlessly tracks backlinks to your competitors websites and their PPC advertising. This is a very comprehensive tool for tracking your competitors and any other website you want.
It can greatly support your online marketing and digital advertising efforts at no cost.
Free options: a free account with several features with data limits and premium accounts
- Wappalyzer (uncover what technology is used on your competitors’ websites at no cost)
Wappalyzer a free online tool for uncovering what technology is used on your competitors’ websites at no cost
Wappalyzer is a simple and absolutely easy to use free online software tool that uncovers the technologies used on websites.
It can shows you the content management systems, ecommerce platforms, server software, analytics tools, and many other technology solutions used in your competitors’ websites.
Moreover, the tool also shows you what are the leading technologies per industry.
Wappalyzer is an open-source platform capable of identifying 1,222 different web technologies.
Free options: only free
- Adbeat (for spying on your competitor’s ad strategies at no cost)
Adbeat – a free tool for spying on your competitor’s ad strategies
If you are searching for free online competitor analysis tools that provide deep insights into the world of digital advertising, Adbeat can be your answer.
It is a different but very useful free solution. You are able to monitor and analyze all the advertisements that your competitors publish.
Adbeat shows you the messaging, creative, placement, size, the number of ads, ad channels, the types of ads, and many other data.
You are able to see the value propositions your competitors are focusing on. And all of these – for free.
Free options: free account with a great range of features and paid accounts
- iSpionage (tool for PPC & SEO competitive Intelligence)
iSpionage – tool for PPC and SEO competitive Intelligence
iSpionage is an online competitor analysis tool that provides valuable PPC and SEO data.
The tool spies on your competitors and shows you what search keywords and advertisement content allow them to attract customers.
Moreover, you’ll be able to discover how much they spend on the paid and organic search, see their landing pages, and uncover their approximate monthly PPC budget.
You can also use this information to discover the top advertisers in your industry.
iSpionage shows you the data with attractive top-notch reports and various types of graphs.
Free options: a free account with a great range of features and paid accounts
- Social Blade (a free social media competitor analysis tool)
Social Blade – a free social media competitor analysis tool
Social Blade is a great completely free tool that tracks user statistics for social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch.
It allows you to gain deeper insights of your competitor’s user growth and trends.
The tool is able to provide you with global analytics for any content creator or brand you want.
Social Blade collect data from channels like Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, Daily Motion, and Instagram and uses these data to create graphs and charts that track progress and growth.
Thus, you can gain very interesting insights for competitors. Social Blade also provides you with a day-by-day follower update as well as a live follower count.
Another great feature is the ability to compere brands’ social presences against each other.
Free options: only free
- Mailcharts (a free email marketing tool for competitive analysis)
Mailcharts – a free email marketing tool for competitive analysis
Mailcharts is a quite powerful tool for email marketers as well as for those who want to spy on competition.
It collects emails from competing campaigns to help you develop your own.
Mailhcharts has an enormous library of emails from countless brands.
It can track and monitor your competitors and their brands to regularly be notified of their activity.
In addition, Mailcharts can compare competitor’s campaigns to your business’ campaigns to let you see where your emails stand.
Moreover, Mailcharts offers a lot of email examples for your inspiration. This way, you can understand what today’s top-performing emails look like.
Free options: a free account that allows you to track 3 companies and paid versions.
- Likealyzer (a free social media competitor analysis tool)
Likealyzer – a free social media competitor analysis tool
If you are searching for comprehensive free online Facebook competitor analysis tools, Likealyzer is a very good solution.
LikeAlyzer will show you an instant health check of any Facebook page.
You can get valuable insights and analytics on your competitors’ Facebook presence by seeing their likes, engagement rate, and PTAT (People Talking About This).
You can also measure responsiveness, posts per day, average post length and other information of multiple competitors to understand where you stand.
Free options: free
- Klear (influencer audit and social media analysis tool)
Klear – an influencer audit and social media analysis tool
Klear is a very cool tool that audits influencer activities on your competitors’ social media accounts.
Thus, you are able to find out influencers and connect with them for your own marketing efforts.
You can search for influencers by skills and location and the tool will generate influencers for you in several categories. This information allows you to determine the quantity and the quality of their followers.
Klear also generates the account’s top content on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Free options: a free plan with limited but powerful features and paid options
- Followerwonk (a free social media research tool)
Followerwonk – a free social media research tool
Followerwonk is a pretty powerful free online tool for learning more about your competitors’ Twitter followers.
The tool allows you to see and analyze your competitors’ followers, the people they follow as well as their overall Twitter actions at no cost.
Also, you can find out the time when your rivals are the most active on Twitter.
Followerwonk uses actionable visualizations to compare your social graph to others.
Using this tool you can analyze and improve your social growth by seeing Twitter analytics. You also can find and connect with new influencers from your market and easily share your reports with your team.
Free options: a free plan and paid options
- Social Searcher (free social media competitor analysis tool)
Social Searcher – a free social media competitor analysis tool
Those who are searching for free social media competitor analysis tools, will be happy to know about this one.
Social Searcher provides you with real-time search on the most popular social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The tool is super easy to use. You just have to fill the name of your competitors to see who mentioned them, and how often, on the key social media sites.
Practically, you are able to instantly measure and track what people are saying about your or your competitor’s brand, product, services and etc. in one easy to use dashboard.
Free options: free
- Talkwalker Alerts (a free web monitoring tool with results from social media)
Talkwalker Alerts – a free web monitoring tool with results from social media
Talkwalker Alerts allows you to monitor the Internet for new content about your name, competitors, or any other topic you want.
The tool can bring every single mention of your competitors across the Web – from websites, blogs, forums, and even Twitter to your inbox in one email.
Further, there are social media analytics filters that cover the most important conversations so you only receive the alerts that matter for you and can customize your strategy accordingly.
Free options: free
- SEOlium (professional Google rank tracker for SEO)
SEOlium is a new Google rank tracker tool for SEO. You can use it to monitor your market and use the data to better understand and improve your business.
It’s a quite different and powerful tool. Unlike other similar tools, SEOlium produces, own, and fully controls their raw data (Google ranks).
As such, there are no artificial limits (number of projects, competitors, or reports). You have consumption-based pricing.
SEOlium is extremely accurate with superb user-Interface and speed and has many many other great features.
On Flux Resource, when the ways to collect data are critical, you have tons of various factors to take in account when spying on your competitors.
Understanding your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, and strategies is the basis on which to create and develop your business strategy and data driven decision making.
And if you are on a limited budget, these are some pretty powerful free online competitor analysis tools that can provide you with valuable insights.
We’ve collected some very useful free tools that cover a range of areas, from social media to SEO and website competitor analysis. You just have to decide which area of your competitor’s presence you want to research on.
You might be using some of these tools already.
Which online competitor analysis tools are you using? Do well to share your experience with us on the comment section at the end of this article.
Free Competitor Analysis Tools for Social Media
Let’s talk about a subject that’s honestly a bit uncomfortable to some marketers.
Competition.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in–marketing is a game of competing for the attention of your audience. With so many marketing channels available today, that competition is oftentimes fierce.
Think about it.
Competition for traffic, ad placement, followers and sales. The list goes on and on. And while the idea of conducting competitive analysis isn’t particularly “fun,” it’s absolutely necessary.
Why Competitor Analysis Tools Are a Must-Have
The good news, though? There are a ton of competitor analysis tools out there to help you quickly and efficiently assess how you stack up against your top competitors.
And with the right tools on deck, you can spend less effort trying to dig dirt on your competitors and more time actually marketing.
Rather than spending too much time trying to spy on your competitors, why not let some smart tools do the legwork for you?
We’ve broken down a comprehensive list of competitor analysis tools that’ll help you do exactly that:
Competitor analysis tools for social media
Competitor analysis tools for SEO
Competitor analysis tools for content
Competitor analysis tools for email, ads and industries
Competitor Analysis Tools for Social Media
- Sprout Social
With social media ranked the No. 1 channel for connecting with customers, there’s no better starting point for competitive analysis.
Sprout Social enables you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points.
You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Whether you want to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting or benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared, it’s all a click away, minus the tedious manual research and messy spreadsheets.
Up your analytics game with Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool that offers deeper insights into your social platforms, along with interactive charts and graphs that you can customise to align with your goals.
Facebook analytics are essential to using Sprout as a competitor analysis tool
Sprout offers the same competitive analytics on Instagram too.
You can conduct Instagram competitor analysis with Sprout
And you can dive even deeper using Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool.
By tapping into publicly available social conversations, you can quickly find out how consumers feel about your competitors’ products and services, as well as examine your own share of voice in your industry.
We use listening to understand what is being said about us across social media, and further into the web, such as in blog posts and on forums. We also track what is being said about our rivals, and the manufacturers that we stock. We then take all this information and use it in our quarterly social media strategies to determine how we can tailor content that we believe our audience may be interested in.
With direct access to consumer sentiment, Sprout makes it easy to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand from competitors.
- Phlanx
This Instagram engagement calculator clues you in on how active any given account’s followers are. This is an awesome resource to analyze your competitor’s Instagram presence. Plus, it doubles as a way to figure out whether or not an influencer has a legitimate following.
Phlanx’s engagement ratio is calculated based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate that followers interact with content (likes, comments, etc).
For example, Trader Joes has an engagement rate of 2.56%. This is a fair score for a larger brand that posts on a consistent basis.
Phlanx engagement analysis for TraderJoes’ Instagram
But compare that to the likes of Denny’s, well known for their cult-like social following and rabid fans:
Phlanx engagement analysis for Denny’s Instagram
This score isn’t the be-all, end-all of a brand’s Instagram presence, but it does offer some much-needed perspective.
Take Adidas, one of the most followed accounts out there, for example. They do get an insane amount of engagement on their posts, but it’s low relative to their massive follower count.
Phlanx engagement analysis for Adidas’ Instagram
This speaks to a bigger point about competitive analysis on social media. Context matters. It’s easy to get caught up in follower counts, but engagement is arguably a much more important metric.
- Social Blade
A fun tool for checking out bigger brands is Social Blade. It assesses follower counts on the likes of Twitter, Instagram and YouTube among other services. Although often used to assess the popularity of celebrities and YouTubers, there are some interesting insights here for marketers.
For example, their Twitter competitor analysis applies a “grade” based on their average number of retweets and likes.
SocialBlade assigns a grade to every social profile you search
Perhaps most notably, Social Blade provides a day-by-day follower update as well as a live follower count.
SocialBlade tracks Twitter follower growth
Another cool feature is the ability to stack brands’ social presences against each other.
SocialBlade compares the activity of multiple Twitter accounts at the same time
Competitor Analysis Tools for SEO
- SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the most widely-used SEO tools on the market, but its competitor analysis features set them apart from the pack. For starters, you can use SEMRush to pull your competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking.
Here’s a sample dashboard after running a domain analysis for FreeCodeCamp:
SEMRush examines your competitors’ backlink profile and traffic sources
And here’s the piece of the analysis which provides a by-the-numbers view of who’s competing for their keywords:
SEMRush can tell you who else is competing for your traffic
This is an invaluable tool for understanding who your competition is from a strictly SEO perspective. Likewise, highlighting what keywords are targeted by competitors directly influences your own content strategy.
- Ahrefs
Another staple competitor analysis tool for SEO is Ahrefs’ site explorer, which allows you to check any URL’s top organic keywords. Additionally, you get a rough estimate of how much traffic a competitor receives on those keywords.
Ahrefs examines your competitors’ organic traffic
It’s easy to check out a site’s highest-performing content based on backlinks (as opposed to shares) too. This information teaches you what sort of products or messaging is working best for a brand.
Ahrefs can identify the source of your competitors’ backlinks
And in addition to highest-performing content, you assess what keywords bring in the most traffic to a competing site.
Ahrefs provides a detailed list of your competitors’ keywords
The takeaway here? Your competition’s traffic doesn’t have to be a guessing game when you’re regularly running your own reports.
- MozBar
This browser extension from Moz provides a surface-level view of how authoritative a site is in the eyes of Google. Based on Moz’s own metric of domain authority (DA), MozBar assigns sites a DA score based on its likelihood to rank in search engines (based on factors such as backlinks). The higher the DA score, the better.
Settled atop your browser, the MozBar is a useful tool to quickly determine a site’s search potential performance at a glance.
MozBar is a competitive analysis tool that looks at a site’s Domain Authority
When enabled, you also see how competing sites compare in a Google query.
MozBar analyzes the domain authority of competing Google results
MozBar allows you to conduct a sort of passive competitive analysis as you examine competing sites to figure out how long they’ve been around and whether or not they’re winning backlinks.
Competitor Analysis Tools for Content
- Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo allows you to look at the top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors. The tool looks at a piece of content’s engagement on social sites as well as its total shares across the web.
Buzzsumo highlights the top-performing content in your industry
Not only does this clue you in on who’s killing it in terms of industry content, but also it helps you identify potentially hot topics to explore yourself.
Buzzsumo highlights your competitors’ most popular pieces of content
Whether you’re looking for movers and shakers in your industry or simply a new idea for a blog post, Buzzsumo provides you with definitive answers.
- Similarweb
Similarweb is an insanely comprehensive tool for both content and SEO. The tools helps you dig deep into your competitor’s content and where their traffic comes from.
For example, you can determine a site’s referral traffic and likewise where a site ends up sending its visitors.
SimilarWeb provides a report of where your competitors’ referrals are coming from
And more importantly, for content marketers, you see what topics visitors search for and what other relevant sites they visit.
SimilarWeb tracks what users are interested in on any given site
- Feedly
If you’re looking for a way to keep an eye on a competitor’s content without checking up on their blog constantly, look no further than Feedly.
Feedly is a content aggregator that stores and organizes content as it’s published, including that of your competitors. This allows you to see hot topics covered by your competitors, all on one page.
Feedly allows you to compile a list of popular industry content
Competitor Analysis Tools for Emails, Ads and Industries
- Mailcharts
Email marketing is arguably one of the most tedious channels for competitive analysis.
Recognizing this, Mailcharts aggregates emails from competing campaigns to help influence your own. In addition to grabbing subject lines, Mailcharts pulls data such as send frequency and compares it to your business’ campaigns to see where your emails stand.
Additionally, the tool compares your campaigns to their own massive library of marketing emails to ensure you’re in tune with best practices (think: timing, frequency, subject line length, etc).
Mailcharts tracks the performance of competing email campaigns
Not only is Mailcharts a powerful competitor analysis tool, but its website offers a ton of email examples to draw inspiration. Pulling from some of the biggest campaigns out there, you get a better idea of what today’s top-performing emails look like.
- Owletter
This tool automatically aggregates emails from competitors and organizes them into a simple, user-friendly dashboard. Owletter’s analytics spots changes in your competitors’ email frequency, and likewise picks up on trends to help you optimize when you should send your own emails.
Owletter aggregates competing email campaigns for analysis
This represents an efficient, data-driven alternative to keeping up a dummy email account to spy on your competitors.
- iSpionage
If you’re interested in a competitor’s paid ads, iSpionage is definitely for you. This tool analyzes multiple aspects of PPC campaigns, including how many keywords a brand is targeting on AdWords:
iSpionage tracks the performance of paid ads
Additionally, you see what their target PPC keywords.
iSpionage provides a list of competitor keywords for PPC ads
You also see who else competes for PPC ads for a particular topic, in addition to how much they’re projected monthly budget is:
iSpionage can determine which competitors are paying for ads on a certain keyword
For brands considering PPC, such a tool is essential for keeping realistic expectations for ad spend.
- Owler
Last but not least, this industry analysis tool uses community data to curate data and content from startups relevant to your niche. Again another tool reserved for bigger brands, you input brands to create your own custom dashboard of industry names to watch.
Owler stacks competitors against each other.
Quick Vital Tips to Have in Mind When Conducting Competitive Analysis
While each of these tools can effectively help you analyze your competitors, you also need to keep in mind what happens after you run the numbers. Below is a sort of “final word” on how to make the most of any competitive intelligence strategy.
Analyze Your Actual Competitors
There’s no use in trying to punch above your weight. A local coffee shop with 1,000 followers shouldn’t beat themselves up because they don’t have as many followers as Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts.
As noted earlier, context matters. Sure, take a look at what the big players in your industry are doing. But when assessing your competition, focus first on those who are the most similar in terms of size and target audience.
Focus on Metrics First
When looking at competitors, it’s tempting to obsess over messaging.
However, it’s more prudent to take a data-driven approach to analysis first. Try to pick out as many metrics before trying to break down the “why” of their marketing.
For example, how often do your competitors post new content? What’s the ratio of promotional versus non-promotional posts? What are their top-performing keywords and hashtags?
The answers to these questions are arguably as important as understanding someone’s messaging.
Turn Analysis into Action
Finally, make sure the data you uncover translates into some sort of action.
Maybe you uncover a new set of keywords to target in your content based on your research. Perhaps you haven’t been pushing your content nearly hard enough based on how active your competitors are.
Either way, the end game of competitive analysis is to improve your own marketing strategy. The more information you glean from competitors, the better.
Which Competitor Analysis Tools Are You Using?
Competitive analysis is a crucial component of fine-tuning your marketing strategy. By using the right set of tools, you can run your analysis quickly and actually spend more time focusing on your own efforts.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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