Let’s be honest - When it comes to competitor monitoring, there is a near-endless number of online tools available to help you in your quest to spy on your competitors. This is, of course, great… Or is it? A key issue many B2B marketing companies find is sorting the good tools from the bad.
Without engaging in accurate, data-driven competitor monitoring, you are potentially missing out on a gold mine of valuable information. For example, which channels do your competitors use, what’s working for them, what isn’t, and what can we learn from them. Without utilizing this readily available data, you are in some ways flying blind!
Luckily for you, we’ve done the research on the best competitor monitoring tools on the market so you don’t have to. And as the leading B2B Marketing Agency in Israel, we can personally attest to the value of the 13 tools covered in this blog. So sit back, grab a coffee, and unlock some golden nuggets of information.
13 Of Our Favorite Competitor Monitoring Tools Available Today
Search Engine Marketing
- SpyFu: SpyFu helps website developers and SEOs remove the guesswork by getting access to top-performing website pages, top organic keywords, website ranking history, and backlink strategies. When it comes to competitor monitoring, the tool also allows you to see your top organic competitors and the keywords you share with them. And simply by entering your competitors' website domain, you can even see every place your competitor appeared on Google over the years: every keyword they've bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation. This SEM and SEO tool can also be used in collaboration with Google AdWords Keyword Planner, which gives insight into which keywords have volume, how much they cost and how hard it is to rank for them.
- BuiltWith extension - BuiltWith is a kick-ass competitor monitoring tool that allows you to, as the name suggests, find out what websites are built with. This website profiling tool can provide great competitive analysis insights & e-commerce data on your competitors, with their tracking including the widgets, analytics, frameworks, content management systems, content delivery networks, web standards, and web servers used by your competitors. This is particularly useful when comparing your competitors' strategies with yours, as you may find some key strategic avenues you can adopt to improve your standing.
- SimilarWeb: For marketers, there’s nothing like the power of raw data. It provides near-endless amounts of analysis opportunities and insights. And with SimilarWeb, you can seamlessly monitor your competitors’ website traffic statistics in sharp detail. Marketed as “the fastest, easiest way to discover what’s really happening online”, it’s hard to disagree. The reason we love this competitor monitoring tool so much is because it’s aimed directly at digital marketers, and addresses many of their key competitor analysis needs. The tool allows you to measure your competitors’ online activity, benchmark your traffic against them, and discover new opportunities. From digital research and benchmarking to competitive analysis and even customer journey mapping, SimilarWeb is a hugely valuable tool for competitor monitoring. It allows you to decipher what works for your competitors, what doesn’t and, most importantly, identify missed opportunities. This information can be extremely powerful in helping you to build a winning SEO plan.
- Google Alerts: Sometimes the most simple competitor monitoring tools are the most effective, and this is certainly the case with Google Alerts. By now, this is (or at least should be) a staple in most digital marketers' arsenal! The tool is simple, yet effective - and allows you to request alerts on company names, people, or particular business relevant keywords. Every time any of these are mentioned on the web, you will get a notification email straight into your inbox. This allows you to create timely response plans or just be aware of industry/competitor relevant news - How convenient!
- SEMrush Extension and web version: This is undoubtedly one of our favorite competitor monitoring tools available anywhere, and should be a key tool in any digital marketers arsenal. The tool allows you to see exactly where you stand relative to your competition in terms of organic website traffic, identify keyword opportunities, and identify gaps in your keywords. This allows you to improve your overall search engine results page (SERP) ranking for relevant keywords. This information can also be used to inform a strategic content strategy covering blogs and other content to further boost your SERP performance and get more relevant traffic & leads.
- Ahrefs: Like many of the competitor monitoring tools listed in this blog, it is likely that you will have heard of Ahrefs before. A highly valuable SEO tool, it shows the exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for organically, and how much traffic they are getting from those keywords. In addition, you can see which keywords your buyer persona is searching for, allowing you to optimize your content by combining this information into a holistic website content plan. The platform also allows you to audit and thereby optimize your website, fixing any pesky SEO problems which may be hampering your overall performance. Even more exciting, you can then track your performance over time, gaining valuable recognition that your efforts are paying off!
- Adthena: You can think of Adthena as a secret weapon against your competitors when it comes to PPC. Providing an entire view of your competitive landscape through its patented machine learning technology, Adthena allows you to gather data across the entire market to assess competitive opportunities and gaps. The key difference between Adthena and many other PPC tools is that it provides deep data on competitor moves, potential brand infringements, and their impact on your campaigns. By acting on their recommendations, brands can expect to both increase revenue while also cutting costs - A win/win!
- iSpionage: In addition to having a really cool name (it reminds us of James Bond!) iSpionage is an awesome tool that helps you uncover your digital marketing blindspots. It achieves this by helping you to “steal” your competitors' website traffic. Through a combination of organic and PPC-related keyword research, you can uncover the best SEO & SEM strategies to help you not only win but dominate your industry's competitive online landscape.
Now that you're effectively gaining website tracking and gathering leads, all you need to do is effectively nurture them! Catch up with us and see how we can help you achieve this.
Social Media
- BuzzSumo: Think of BuzzSumo is an all-in-one content marketing tool that allows you to generate content ideas, create high-performing content, monitor your performance, and you guessed it, monitor your competitors' content! By simply entering a competitor's domain address, you can see a vast amount of useful information, such as their top-performing social content and which pages generate the most clicks, and even backlink information. The data can also be filtered in many ways allowing you to deep-dive into whatever you find most interesting. Again, this allows a wealth of idea-generation ideas, making BuzzSumo one of our favorite competitor monitoring tools on the market!
- Brandwatch: Brandwatch is another great competitor monitoring tool that allows you to benchmark your online performance relative to your key competitors. The tool gives real-time insights on how your online presence stacks up against your competitors, as well as how/when/where your brand is mentioned vs your competitors. This allows marketers to identify potentially overlooked opportunities to inject themselves into online discussions and gain increased brand awareness among their target audience… And as they say, top of voice, top of mind.
Search Engine Marketing & Social Media
- AdEspresso: In many ways, successful social media advertisements are a mix of science and art. And we think everyone can agree that data-driven creativity is crucial to making a high-performing social ad. Well, say hello to AdEspresso - A tool that allows you to monitor your competitors' Facebook advertisements and draw ideas from them to incorporate into your own social media advertisement. The tool also shows examples of high-performance ads for multiple different ad types (photo ads, carousel ads, video ads, etc.) allowing you to get your creative juices flowing. So why not increase the effectiveness of your Facebook Ads with less trial and error by learning from your competitors' wins and fails?
- Brew: Brew is slightly different from many of the tools we’ve listed above in that it measures the impact of ALL marketing activities… Even those difficult to measure things like branding and messaging. The platform allows marketers to gain visibility into their competitors' content, events, conference attendance, and more. This makes it easier to identify potential market opportunities which would otherwise have been overlooked. With Brew, you can gain visibility into overall industry trends, and your share of voice, as well as see the impact of each of your activities and how these drive commercial value and ROI. These aspects combine to make Brew a hugely powerful tool in a marketer's arsenal.
See how to supercharge your inbound marketing!
Video Marketing
- VidTao: When it comes to YouTube advertisements, the creative is undoubtedly the single biggest factor that determines the success or failure of the ad. This is where VidTao comes in. In addition to enabling you to spy on your competitors' ads, and see which ones are performing well, the tool also breaks down the best performing YouTube ads into simple, repeatable frameworks. This enables you to simultaneously draw inspiration from your competitors' ads, and also easily script and create high-performing ads based on best practices.
And there you have it - 13 of our favorite competitor monitoring tools on the market! In addition to looking inward at your own performance, looking at (and getting ideas from) your competitors can open your eyes to a world of opportunities you may otherwise be missing. By combining internal data with competitor research, not only can you boost your own online performance, but you can also benchmark yourself relative to your competitors, allowing you to create data points and track your performance over time.
Building a stellar content plan, and improving your positioning relative to your competitors may not seem like a high-priority task when compared to more immediate ROI goals, but in the long run, it is a highly fruitful and effective way to keep that lead-generation pipeline moving soundly.
And the tools we listed in this blog are just the tip of the iceberg on your road to competitive success. Competitor monitoring tools are one of the key resources every B2B marketer needs. And while we could list 100’s of tools to help you, in this blog we listed 13 of our favorites! Did we leave any out? Let us know your favorite competitor monitoring tool in the comments section below!