Tech-stack to spy on competition.

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Running a digital business has many advantages, it is easy to track, comparatively easy to scale, and easy to experiment.

But one of the disadvantages it brings is that it is easy for your competition to spy and steal.

There is nothing wrong with having competition, in fact, I think it is good if you have competition in your category, which means you have captured the right product-market fit and your competition is also doing the job of category or demand creation.

At the same time, it is easy also easy for you to track what your competition is doing and take inspiration from it.

Copying competition does not take a brand anywhere but if you want to learn from them, and take inspiration then it makes complete sense.

In today’s newsletter, I am going to give you some of the most useful competition tracking tools.

Without further ado, let’s get straight into it:

1. To track competition SEO and paid traffic: There are many tools available today to track competition traffic. The one that I use frequently is SEMrush and Ahrefs. Both tools can give your competition’s Domain overview, traffic analytics, backlink profile etc.

   Another important data that SEMrush provides is the data on the industry.

   For example, under the ‘market explorer‘ report section, you will be able to find the Total addressable market and serviceable addressable market for a particular category. This helps in prospecting the market that how big is the opportunity you have on search.

   After the trial period, the base price of SEMrush starts from $119/month.

2. Spying on the competition search ad keywords: Spying on competition search keywords can unravel their strategy. Which category they are going aggressive towards, which category they are going a little slow and if you can scale up spending for the category where your competition is slow etc.

   The best tool that I have used to spy on competition is Spyfu. You just have to enter the web address of your competition on the homepage of Spyfu and the basic version will give you a few keywords on which competition is active.

   The basic paid plan of Spyfu starts from $16/month

3. Social listening, track competition hashtags: Tracking the conversation happening about your competition on the internet can be a critical hook to acquire customers. One of the exercises that Apple does frequently is sentiment analysis. Wherein it hires research agencies in different countries to understand what is the emotion that people have whenever Apple launches a new product, are conversations happening on social appreciative, are they positive, happy or is it the opposite?

   Depending on the finding of this research, Apple decides on the theme and timing of different PR campaigns or advertisements. While you can do this exercise for your own brand but keeping a tab on what conversations are happening about your competition is also a very effective strategy. I have seen good brands doing this- they track the dissatisfaction or negative reviews that people have with their competitive brand and use this information to create the next campaign theme.

   For ex., if the customer of your competition is not happy about delivery timings in Delhi/NCR and they are dropping negative reviews about it, you can come up with a campaign in Delhi/NCR highlighting your supply chain efficiencies. The tool that you can consider for this is social searcer and Google Alerts and the base version of these tools are free.

4. To track display ads of competition: The display is a popular and often efficient form of advertising. The problem is that you have to know how to do it – you have to create a nice and effective ad and place it in the right place.

   Observing what ads your competition is running can help you create your own strategy – you might spot weaknesses in their marketing message or have an idea of where to place them to bring more high-quality traffic.

   Similarly to monitoring ads in search engines, you are not able to visit all the websites to check where your competitors place their ads so you need a tool.

   Tool that you can consider using is Adbeat. After the free trial the base plan starts from $249/month

5. To track competition tech stack: Sometimes you just know that the competitor is better at something, for example, marketing. You visited their website and they track you everywhere with ads that are so well-tailored you just want to click. They might be the masters of Google Remarketing and Facebook Retargeting but you know it’s something more – you see ads not only from their networks but others as well.

   Do they have a team of top-notch marketers who place great ads everywhere? No way, they employ 5 people including 2 interns. There must be some clever software involved. How to check what exactly?

   Not a big deal – visit builtwith and type in the URL. You will see what technologies the website uses so you can implement it for yourself or look for even better alternatives. Checking technologies on websites is free, more advanced features (importing a list of websites using given technologies) are included in a paid version.

   Tool to be used is builtwith. A few searches on the tool are free and thereafter it the base plan is worth $295/month

6. To track any change competition does on their website: Your competition may have hundreds of pages on their website and it is next to impossible to know when they make any change on their website or add a new page. Keeping a tab on the website updates can help you understand their product and website strategy and you can build a defensive or offensive strategy for your business.

   The tool you can use to track website changes is Visual Ping. 150 checks a month on up to 5 pages per day is free on Visual Ping. Post that the base paid version starts from $10/month which covers 1000 checks a month on up to 25 pages per day. In case you want to track the entire website of your competition which has hundreds of pages then you can opt for a Business plan which has up to 20,000 checks a month on unlimited pages. This plan starts from $100/month.

   So these are some of the important tools you can keep in your stack in order to spy on your competition and take inspiration from them or work on an offensive or defensive strategy based on your competition's actions.

That’s it for today, folks!

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Have an awesome Sunday ahead!

Cheers,

Apurv