Discover how to track competitors and the tools that make it a little bit easier
Amazon.com bought IMDB.com simply because they had been a great affiliate that was starting to expand into the Amazon space around 1998. As of late, one of the biggest trends in digital media is to buy your biggest opponent, or whomever makes a product that you should have made yourself. Google does it (YouTube, JotSpot, Motorola Mobility), Twitter is doing it (Tweetdeck, BagCheck, BackType, Tweetie, etc.) and every other “2.0” web business who is likely to make it through the bubble is doing it.
What ever happened to good old-fashioned competitive intelligence? Luckily, as online competition grows, so do the tools available to us.
AdBeat and SpyFu are both awesome platforms (with a modest price tag and free trials) to find out all of the ads that your competitors are running on different ad networks, including Google Analytics. Want to know just how that competitor is selling those books? Take a look at all of the ads they use to point to that page, including images and copy.
Wordstream’s AdWords Performance Grader is also a great new tool that acts as a free report card, comparing your AdWords campaigns to those of your competitors. According to Larry Kim, WordStream Founder and Chief Technology Officer, they “built this free tool to provide advertisers with an easy to digest snapshot of how their ad campaigns are performing and to tutor them on how to make changes that will boost their performance and save money.”
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OpenSiteExplorer is also a good tool if you’re looking to find out who is linking to the landing page of your competitor. If you want to know what kind of partnerships they’ve built and what quality those partnerships they are, this tool will tell you.
Google Alerts is useful if you want to know when someone has mentioned the landing page/product that you are looking to analyze. With this data you can see what bloggers are willing to sponsor products or write reviews.
TweetBeep offers the same alerts as above, except on Twitter.
Compete Site Analytics is a free service that will reveal a website’s monthly unique visitor count. If your competitor’s landing page has a unique URL for tracking reasons, this will be easy. If they don’t, you’ll need to log into Compete to get subdomain stats.
Compete Search Analytics enables you to discover keywords driving traffic to any domain, identify gaps in your search strategy, and track your performance against competitors.
Do you have any other tools to share? Drop them in the comments, and we’ll discuss!
