How do you feel about your competition? Love them or hate them?
For most of us, it’s a mix: they keep us on our toes and also annoy the bejesus out of us when they get that campaign or positioning just right.
Let’s see how you can get some insights into their wins and losses.
Why even bother to spy on your competitors?
Before you launch an intelligence operation that would make the CIA jealous, ask yourself this: what am I hoping to learn by spying on my competitors?
The worst possible answer is that you’re looking for a couple more reasons to justify feeling superior to them.
Competitors make us better every day, trite as that may seem. More importantly, healthy competition = healthy market.
If you find yourself all alone in a market, something’s off. In most cases, you’re not on your way to building the monopoly of the century, you’re barking at the wrong tree and building something there’s no demand for.
​This is a good primer to figure out your market size and health​.
The goals you want for your competitor analysis:
- Are they thriving or struggling? → If they are thriving, what can I learn from their approach? If they are struggling, is it because the market is in trouble or because they screwed the pooch? Also, which pooch did they screw?
- What untapped opportunities are there? → Some keywords they’re not targeting, a market segment they’re ignoring, a social network they haven’t tapped into yet are all good examples here.
- Strengths versus weaknesses → Where’s my sweet spot? Example: they dominate X/Twitter in my niche, but I can build a stronger presence on LinkedIn.
7 tools to spy on your competitors
This isn’t exactly a tool but it’s the cornerstone of competitor analysis:
Follow your competitors on social media and subscribe to their newsletter
You can use a dummy email address or profile that doesn’t disclose your identity, although, in most cases, it’s unnecessary: they probably follow you around too.
When you follow them/subscribe to their stuff, you get to see things in real-time (most tools below aren’t real-time) and have a better overview of their marketing strategy. In time, you’ll also see how they evolve and when they change gears.
OK, onto real tools now:
[Note: most of these tools are free or have a freemium option. I have no commercial relationship with them, other than being their user myself.]
1. Google Alerts
​Google Alerts​ are free and ideal for keeping an eye on larger competitors, the kind that have a regular media presence.
Once you’ve set an alert, you will get an email every time their name is mentioned online. No, you won’t be spammed with social media mentions, you’ll just get the good stuff.
Pro tip: while you’re there, set an alert for yourself/your brand name too. You don’t want to miss out on your own juicy media mentions!
2. SimilarWeb
​SimilarWeb​ is my favorite starting point because you can spy on:
- Traffic
- Audience profile
- Keywords your competitor ranks for
- Backlinks — who sends them traffic
- Social media — which platforms send them traffic
- Tech stack — what plugins they use on their website
- Traffic sources, and more
Here’s an example of Statista’s traffic sources:
The full analysis for Statista is ​here​.
Better yet, you can compare two websites. In this case, I could compare Statista to McKinsey and see how each of them attracts users.
You can replicate this by comparing your website to your competitor’s or two competitor websites.
The biggest limitation of SimilarWeb is that it only works for BIG websites. If you or your competitors don’t attract at least 10k visitors a month, you won’t get too many data points. Also, some of the data may be inaccurate, so take it with a grain of salt.
3. Phlanx
​Phlanx​ is a nifty tool to spy on your competitors’ Instagram profiles. The engagement rate calculator is a quick way to find out if your competitor’s followers are dormant or highly engaged.
Just type in a handle and you’ll get a quick overview. For instance, Kim Kardashian has a 1.57% engagement rate, while Kylie Jenner’s is 4.38%. Yikes!
4. Social Blade
​Social Blade​ is similar to Phlanx, but a bit more in-depth. It analyses profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, X/Twitter, and more.
Here’s an example analysis of Dunkin’ Donuts’ Twitter profile:
Their overall rating and recent activity monitoring are very interesting features — monitor those regularly.
5. Built With
From their CMS to the plugins your competitors use, ​BuiltWith.com​ reveals it all. It’s a good place to start if you love something on their website and want to replicate it.
6. Semrush
If you rely on content marketing and/or SEO a lot, ​Semrush​ will give you all the insights you need into your competition, from the keywords they rank for to social media profiles, and more.
You can read more about how their competitor analysis solution works ​here​. Semrush is a paid tool and it’s not exactly cheap. My agency used it for years with great results, so if you want to level up your content/SEO game, consider becoming a client.
If you’re only looking for surface-level results, their free plan or their free trial will give you some insights to get you started.
7. Owletter
Feeling overwhelmed by the amount of emails hitting your inbox? ​Owletter​ will neatly organize them for you in a single dashboard, where you’ll get an overview of:
- Email frequency
- Days when your competitors send emails
- Hours of the day when they send them
- Any changes in email frequency and timing
This is a paid tool but it’s fairly affordable and a good replacement for the dummy account you use to subscribe to all those newsletters.
Some manual work needed
Automation is great but it will rarely aggregate the data for you. Plus, most of these tools only spy on one channel or group of channels your competitors are on, so you’ll need to piece things together.
As always, I invite you to use critical thinking because getting buried in irrelevant data is quite common. For example, don’t panic if one of your spy tools shows a significant uptick in your competitor’s social following. It might be a fluke (a rare viral post) and you don’t know if that translates to added revenue.
Don’t ditch your ​best-performing channels​ to go chasing someone else’s fame.
Lastly, this is not a comprehensive competitor espionage tools list — it’s barely scratching the surface. I found most of those tools the good old-fashioned way: I googled things like a grandma: “find competitor’s web traffic information” or “how do I analyze a competitor’s social media channels”.
If you ever need information about someone else’s business, start there. In most countries, you will also be able to find some financial information about other companies.
Secret agent work is fun, albeit time-consuming.
Adriana’s Picks
- This just in: ​the ConvertKit State of the Creator Economy report​ dropped recently and it’s full of gems. Did you know that most creators are Millennials, for instance? Of course, the data is skewed toward ConvertKit users, so take it with a grain of salt.
- ​LinkedIn launches games​. Yes, you can now play games on LinkedIn — I mean games other than who’s getting burned by the algorithm today.
- Déjà vu: eight publishers, including the Chicago Tribune, ​are suing Microsoft and OpenAI​, alleging they used copyrighted articles to train their AI models. The New York Times filed suit last year.
That’s it from me today!
See you next week in your inbox.
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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