Alexis Kestler
As a data analyst and technology enthusiast, I‘m fascinated by the power of data and analytics to drive strategic business decisions. One area where data can provide tremendous value is understanding your competition. But comprehensive competitive intelligence activities often require significant investments in tools, people and processes.
The good news is that today there are a number of free tools that allow even bootstrapped startups and resource-constrained teams to keep tabs on competitors and identify strategic opportunities. In this detailed guide, I‘ll provide my insights as an analyst on 8 must-have competitive intelligence tools, along with tips to help you get set up quickly.
Why Competitive Intelligence Matters
Before we dive into the tools, it‘s important to level set on why competitive intelligence should be a priority. Here are three key reasons:
Spot Trends and Opportunities
By analyzing the moves your competitors make, you can often spot crucial trends and gaps in your market early. If you see a competitor rapidly gaining search traffic or social media followers, that signals an opportunity for your brand. Competitive intelligence allows you to find these openings and capitalize on them ahead of the pack.
Learn From What‘s Working
Your competitors are likely spending significant time and money figuring out what resonates in your shared market. Their website copy, product features, pricing, and campaigns essentially provide free focus group research for you to benchmark against. Competitive intelligence lets you learn from their hard work!
Inform Strategic Decisions
At the end of the day, the insights you uncover from monitoring competitors should inform your strategy and decision making across marketing, product development, operations and more. With competitive intelligence, you can make data-driven moves that close gaps and build on strengths vs. competitors.
Website Monitoring With Visualping
Let‘s start with one of the most basic but powerful competitive intelligence capabilities – website change monitoring. Visualping provides free alerts when there are changes made to any web page.
This makes it simple to keep tabs on key competitor website pages including:
- Homepage: New product announcements and featured content
- Pricing pages: Price changes
- Product pages: New features or releases
- Team pages: New hires
Visualping sends you an email anytime it detects a change on the page. Each alert includes screenshots of the page with the specific changes highlighted:
Monitoring a competitor‘s pricing page for changes is easy with Visualping
With just the URL, Visualping can begin monitoring a page in seconds. You can track multiple pages per competitor and configure the monitoring frequency to be as often as every 5 minutes. This enables you to stay continuously up-to-date on the key areas of competitor sites.
While the free version limits the number of pages and competitors you can track, it‘s incredibly useful for keeping an eye on a few high priority pages. Website monitoring provides one of the quickest ways to identify new competitor offerings and respond appropriately.
Traffic and Engagement Benchmarking With SimilarWeb
Beyond monitoring for website changes, I also recommend looking at high level traffic and engagement metrics for competitor sites. SimilarWeb provides free tools to analyze and compare website visitor data including:
- Total visits
- Traffic sources
- Bounce rates
- Page views
- Average time on site
- Location of visitors
SimilarWeb gives you a snapshot of how your competitors‘ websites are performing compared to your own traffic. This market-level intelligence can help you understand their growth trajectory and engagement levels.
For example, if a competitor site has been steadily growing traffic while you remain flat, that suggests they are resonating better with your shared audience. Breaking down their traffic sources and engagement metrics can help reveal why.
SimilarWeb makes it easy to directly compare website traffic metrics
SimilarWeb provides only high-level snapshots – more detailed analytics require upgraded paid plans. However, it‘s a great free resource to quickly benchmark competitor website strength. Monitoring this monthly can alert you to new threats and help inform content and marketing strategies.
Tracking SEO Authority With Ahrefs
Search engine optimization remains a critical channel for reaching potential customers. As an analyst, I‘m a firm believer in keeping close tabs on your SEO metrics and competitors‘ performance.
Ahrefs provides free tools to view summary domain authority data – one of the top ranking factors in search algorithms.
Specifically Ahrefs shows:
- Domain Rating: an overall authority score from 0-100
- Total Backlinks: the number of domains linking back to the site
- Referring Domains: the number of unique domains with backlinks
With a single click, Ahrefs will show how your domain stacks up against a competitor‘s. If their domain rating suddenly surpasses yours, that‘s a clear signal they may outrank you in future search results.
Quickly compare overall domain authority with Ahrefs‘ free snapshot
While Ahrefs‘ free tool only provides a light snapshot, it‘s extremely useful for quick periodic checks. Monitoring your domain rating gap with competitors gives you early warning when they may be poised to overtake your rankings.
Display Ads Research With Moat
Display and paid search advertising data provides another valuable signal about competitors‘ strategies and spending. Moat offers a free searchable display ad archive.
You can use Moat to research:
- Display ad creatives competitors are using
- Placements purchased – useful for publisher targeting
- Active campaign timing and seasonality
Studying your competitors‘ ads often provides inspiration for your own creative concepts and copy. You can identify common themes and formats that tend to resonate.
Moat also gives visibility into the scope of competitors‘ display budgets based on campaigns and reach. This helps size up their investment and targeting strategies.
Research competitor display ads and creatives with Moat‘s free archive
While limited to display ads, Moat provides helpful examples and intelligence to inform your own planning and strategy. With these insights, you can craft differentiated campaigns tailored to beating competitors.
Social Listening and Share of Voice With Mention
Monitoring brand awareness and sentiment on social platforms provides a wealth of competitive intelligence. Mention offers free media and social listening tools to track mentions of your brand and competitors.
With Mention, you can analyze:
- Volume of brand mentions over time
- Share of voice compared to competitors
- Sentiment and reach of mentions
- Top publishers and authors
Share of voice metrics are particularly helpful to assess brand awareness against competitors. If a close competitor is generating significantly more mentions, that indicates potential for growth.
Compare brand share of voice and get insights with Mention
Mention provides useful real-time alerts whenever you or a competitor are mentioned online. This enables you to rapidly respond to negative reviews and capitalize on positive mentions.
Social listening should be an ongoing effort to truly understand brand perception versus competitors. Mention makes this easy and accessible through free plans.
Keyword and PPC Research With SpyFu
Paid search is another major marketing battlefield with competitors. SpyFu offers free competitive keyword research based on Google Ads data.
With SpyFu, you can research:
- Paid keywords competitors are targeting
- Click-through rates and costs of those keywords
- SEM spending over time
- Organic keywords they rank for
These insights help reveal the terms and phrases resonating in your market. You can assess gaps in your own paid and organic approaches based on successful competitor keywords.
Research paid and organic keywords with SpyFu
SpyFu compiles competitive keyword data and history to inform your search campaigns. Boosting spending and bidding on proven high-performing terms can help drive additional traffic and conversions.
The free version has search limits, but provides ample data for actionable competitor keyword research.
Broad Competitive Tracking With Crayon
Up to this point, we‘ve covered monitoring specific aspects of competitors – like website changes, ads, and keywords. Crayon offers an AI-powered platform to track competitors across all key online signals.
With a Crayon free account, you can:
- Monitor competitor website changes
- Get alerts on new online brand mentions and news
- Track job postings and employee changes
- Follow product and service reviews
- And more!
Crayon aggregates competitor data and developments across the web to give you an efficient overview in one dashboard. This saves tons of manual searching effort.
Crayon provides automated tracking of competitors across websites, search, social, reviews and other sources
While limited to one competitor for free, Crayon gives you broad visibility into their digital activity and strategy. This top level perspective makes it easier to connect insights across marketing, product, hiring and operations.
Pulling Competitor Intelligence Together
Hopefully this guide has shown how competitive intelligence provides actionable strategic insights accessible even to smaller teams. Each of the free tools we‘ve covered brings part of the picture into focus.
A few key tips for making the most of free competitive intelligence:
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Combine 2-3 complementary tools like website monitoring, traffic analytics and social listening to get a more complete view.
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Focus tracking on 1-2 close competitors initially where intelligence can have the biggest impact.
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Set up automated alerts so important competitor moves don‘t get missed.
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Review insights monthly as part of strategic planning. Competitive intelligence is wasted if not regularly reviewed!
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Turn findings into action – adjust marketing, product roadmaps, etc. based on what the data says.
With the right competitive intelligence toolkit, you can affordably gather the strategic insights needed to continually adapt and beat competitors. What free competitive intelligence tools have you found most valuable? Let me know on Twitter @datatechnerd.
