Running a successful business these days means keeping a close eye on the competition. Don’t think for a moment that your competitors aren’t using online competitor analysis tools to keep tabs on you. To maintain a competitive intelligence advantage in your industry, it’s mandatory to explore your competitions’ successes and failures.
Fortunately, there are many tools out there to keep you informed on different aspects of a competitor’s movements. With these tools in hand, business owners and marketers can adjust their strategies to stay ahead of the pack. As such, we’ll share our list of the best online competitor analysis tools for brands. Specifically, we’ll cover the following tools:
- NetBase Quid
- WhatRunsWhere
- Owler
- Link Explorer
- Ontolo
- Owletter
- Awario
- SpyFu
Before we get rolling, here are a few statistics that point to the increasing importance of perfecting your online competitor analysis game:
- 74% of brands say their main competitors are already using online competitor analysis to explore competitive advantages and differentiate themselves in the market.
- 90% of Fortune 500 companies already use competitive intelligence such as online competitor analysis to gain an edge over the competition.
- Online competitor analysis should be a key ingredient in your competitive intelligence A recent survey found 48% of businesses said their industry was much more competitive than usual.
Now let’s dive in and look at a few of our top picks for tools that’ll help sharpen your online competitor analyses:
1. NetBase Quid
If you want to supercharge your next online competitor analysis right off the bat, this is the tool to do it. Setting up an analysis on a competitor is a breeze and can capture both real-time and historical data. Next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) scours the internet for competitor mentions and pulls them into the dashboard for analysis.
Data can provide competitive intelligence on top authors, keywords, consumer demographics and behavior, geo-data, news and blog traction, net sentiment, and much more. Robust alert functionality allows you to stay informed when a competitor starts getting traction in a particular area of interest to your brand.
Additionally, NetBase Quid makes sharing your intel throughout your organization a snap. Prepare reports, dashboards, and data visualizations with the click of a button, so your decision-makers stay in the loop.
2. WhatRunsWhere
If you want to keep an eye on your competitor’s advertising performance, this is the tool for you. WhatRunsWhere provides brands with digital ad intelligence around their ads and those of their competition.
In a nutshell, it allows you to see which ad types are doing well, where traffic is best, specific ad performance, landing page impressions, etc. It’s an online competitor analysis tool that can provide critical intel for tracking the other guy’s ad campaigns – as well as your own.
3. Owler
Owler is an excellent complement to your online competitor analysis arsenal. Its premise is to help your brand discover, research, and track the competitors that matter to you. Owler provides data on over 13 million public and private businesses worldwide, including intel on funding, acquisitions, company leadership, employee data, and much more.
4. Moz Link Explorer
No online competitor analysis is complete without getting the skinny on a competitor’s website performance. Link Explorer is not only free, but it also gives you a comprehensive analysis of any URL you want. That way, you know what’s performing well and what isn’t. Anything to bolster your SEO performance is well worth the effort.
5. Ontolo
Ontolo is an online competitor analysis tool that uncovers potential contacts, URLs, and prospects for any marketing situation – and it does it fast. Whether you’re uncovering data for link building, SEO, advertising, or to gain competitive intelligence, Ontolo does these and much more. Speed to insight is the name of the game, as their tagline suggests – “detailed research for time-crunched marketers.”
6. Owletter
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to engage your consumers. Owletter is a unique addition to your online competitor analysis toolbox as it helps to disclose your competition’s email strategy. All you have to do is get on a competitor’s email list, and Owletter does the rest. It’s email analytics on your competitors that reveals profound insights for your marketing department.
7. Awario
Awario can be used as a stand-alone tool or used to complement your primary online competitor analysis tools. It includes social media monitoring functionality, as well as influencer marketing tools and hashtag tracking. However, where Awario shines for competitive intelligence is its Leads feature which finds social media posts asking for recommendations on products similar to yours. The tool then searches within these posts for users complaining about the competition’s products. It then generates sales leads within the application so you can make your move.
8. SpyFu
SpyFu is another pretty cool online competitor analysis tool that shows you how competitors’ domains perform on Google. Specifically, it’ll show you everywhere the domain has shown up, the keywords they’ve purchased on Google Ads, all of their organic rankings, as well as their ad variations. It’s an excellent solution for understanding your competitor’s ad performance so you can replicate their successes and learn from their underperforming ad tests.
Online competitor analysis is a must for brands to remain competitive in their market. As we’ve shown, your competitors are likely using some of these same tools to uncover insights about you.
It’s never too late to get on the road to better competitive intelligence. Reach out for a demo, and we’ll help put your brand in the fast lane.
