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How to Spy on Your Competitors
Marketing, operations, sales. They’re all important for your business.
So is competitive analysis. Without spying (ahem, keeping an eye on) the competition, how are you supposed to stay ahead, instead of lagging behind?
Competitive analysis gives you serious insights into what your competitors are doing, whether it’s working for them, and how you might apply those insights to your business.
Armed with this knowledge, you can change up your approach for a single channel, or pivot your entire marketing strategy. You might make a few small, yet significant, adjustments, or you may make large-scale, sweeping changes.
Either way, you’ll position your marketing to be a lot more effective in attracting leads, and turning them into customers.
7 Best Competitor Analysis Tools to Stay Ahead
There are a wealth of competitive analysis tools out there. Here are some of the best you can try to round out your marketing toolkit.
1. For High-Level Metrics: SimilarWeb
Interested in knowing which channels drive the most traffic for your competitors? Get the lay of the land with SimilarWeb. Pop a domain into this tool, and you’ll get instant access to their overall traffic numbers, by country and by channel, along with other key metrics.
Beyond this already useful information, the paid version of SimilarWeb packs in additional features like competitive keyword research, your competitor’s most popular content, and who their likely affiliates are (based on their top traffic referrers).
2. For SEO: SEMRush and Ahrefs
SEMRush and Ahrefs are fan favorites among the SEO community. Mostly, the preference comes down to which interface you prefer, and if one offers a slightly more advanced offering of a particular feature you care about.
With either of these tools, you can view your competitors’ top-ranking organic pages, and which specific keywords are driving traffic to those pages. You can also monitor their backlinks to build your own list of competitive link targets.
Here are two features we believe deserve special attention:
- Ahrefs Content Gap: This helps you discover what keywords your competitors’ are ranking for, but you aren’t, so you can develop even better content and steal their spots in the SERPs.
- SEMRush Backlink Gap: With this tool, you can load in multiple competitors at once, to see how many sites are linking to one or more of them, but not to you.
Outshine Your Competition
Now that you know where you stand, partner with our team of digital marketing experts to take your brand to the next level.
3. For PPC: iSpionage and SpyFu
Both of these tools deliver the same juicy insights as the SEO counterparts we just highlighted, but for your competitors’ paid search campaigns.
You can view overall PPC metrics for your competitors, including their total spend and paid keywords. You can also see how their spending has changed over time and browse their top-performing ads.
That alone is insightful, but you can get even more specific, down to the ad level. On iSpionage, you can view the landing pages linked to from a campaign, and with SpyFu (below), you can see the exact copy they used in their PPC ads:
4. For Content Research: Buzzsumo
Both Ahrefs and SEMRush will offer you competitive content insights, Buzzsumo truly shines at content research.
All you have to do is plug in a topic or a domain, and BuzzSumo reveals its top-performing content. You can refine your search using their filters, so if you want to find your competitors’ best content from the past year, select that filter. Only interested in what’s driving their Facebook Engagements? Filter for that. This is a fantastic tool with powerful filter functionality.
5. For Email Marketing: MailCharts and Owletter
Are you sick of filling your inbox with competitors’ newsletters, simply because you have no other way of performing competitive email research? That’s understandable.
Fortunately, MailCharts and Owletter are two competitive email marketing tools you can use instead. Both of these tools capture your competitors’ email campaigns, saving them in a handy photo dashboard instead of cluttering your own inbox.
Plus, the tools auto-analyze your competitors’ emails to provide competitive, high-level insights into metrics such as their average send frequency, open rate, click rate, and more.
6. For Social Media: SocialBlade and HootSuite
HootSuite’s made a name for itself as a social listening tool (and rightly so), but it does a lot more than merely aggregate your competitors’ branded hashtags and social media feeds into one convenient spot for you to review. HootSuite can also help you make sense of those feeds.
How is your competitors’ social media strategy working out for them? More importantly, how does yours stack up in comparison? Use HootSuite to understand how often your competitors are posting, on which channels, and how high (or low) their engagement rate is.
HootSuite is excellent at giving you all the information, via comprehensive, always up-to-date feeds. SocialBlade is excellent for the quick hits. With this competitor analysis tool, you can view your competitor’s daily engagement and follower gain/loss totals.
7. For Creative Ads: Moat
Need help brainstorming new creative? You won’t find a better competitor analysis tool than Moat. With this innovative tool, you search by brand name, and the tool surfaces all of that brand’s digital ad campaigns.
You’ll get to see their ads in all their glory, from expansive right-rail ads to display banners. You can even hover to get more details for a specific ad, such as the device it targeted and the dates the campaign ran.
Taking Competitive Insights to the Next Level
Competitive analysis tools deliver a goldmine of information. For help turning that information into a competitive strategy that nets you new customers, contact Your Marketing People.
Stay Ahead of Your Competition
With the help of Your Marketing People, your brand can get an edge over your competition with a winning strategy, frequent reporting and status updates, and a digital marketing team that has your back every step of the way.
