An introduction to popular tools and extensions that can help you understanding your competitor’s marketing and content strategy Word of caution — I most probably won’t talk about hacking — I am not cool enough. In fact, today, I’m going to wedge myself somewhere between competitor analysis and effective ways/tools to help you spy on your competitors’ products and marketing efforts. A lot of us MBA folks readily associate competitor analysis with SWOT and Porter’s Five Forces, product guys think about Kano model, data guys think about Perceptual model, BCG thinks of BCG Growth Share matrix etc. Was I just listing down frameworks that I could remember and are most definitely not party ice breakers? Probably. Is this going to the subject of my article? Most certainly not. As the internet world gets increasingly complex and products cut across geographical lines, as use cases and target customers start overlapping, and finally as everyone starts to fight for the same set of eyeballs and their wallets, it’s crucial to understand your market, assess your competition and evaluate how your product or service is placed relative to others. More specifically, you start with understanding WHO your competition is and then figure out what they do. There is quite a bit of comprehensive literature out there but for the sake of brevity, you can categorize your competition on the basis of the customer they serve and the problem they solve for. So, someone who is solving the same problem and serving the same customer as you, is in your “direct turf”; someone who is solving the same problem for a different customer or solving other problems for the same customer could be an indirect competitor. Based on how you’d like to define your target market and how you expect it to evolve (for example, considering just your direct competitors could narrow down your market significantly), you can make a list and order it based on similarity or just plain market share. The only other thing to keep in mind is that competitor bench-marking should be used for what it is — a benchmark. There is really not much hope if this is used as a basis for building something or as a basis for driving your road map. I think there’s a lot of valuable lessons to be learned from a competitor’s journey, especially if they have been around for longer than you. Their journey can definitely help you in avoiding obvious mistakes, coming up with a stronger go-to-market plan and making the most out of your marketing budget. Broadly, you can break down your analysis across 4 areas below and I’ve listed tools and some tips to get you started on your spying journey:

1. Company
2. Product
3. Customers and Content
4. Marketing

By no means is the list of tools exhaustive or cover all aspects of your analysis, however they are a great starting point and can help you uncover insights really soon. Let’s get into it: Company: I’m going to skip the obvious ones here, like the company’s website, Crunchbase profile and Glassdoor reviews (understand their culture and hiring process!) and go straight into other interesting tools.

1. Google Alerts Google Alerts is a neat and inexpensive way to keep tabs on your competition and get important updates on them based on specific search terms and preferences. You can create custom search queries based on the depth of information you need — for example, if you want updates on a company’s specific product line, you can specify the company and the product with an ‘AND’ to only get updates when both of them are mentioned. Similarly, you can also get update when any one of them are mentioned with an ‘OR’ sign. You can also select the source of the update — news, web, video, blogs etc and also the geographic region from which you need them. Finally, you can get all your alerts delivered to your inbox in one single email so you don’t need to check multiple emails. Neat little trick, right?

2. LinkedIn and Jobs Well, this one is easy. Most companies keep their LinkedIn page up to date and use it as a medium of engaging with their potential customers AND hires. A lot of companies post their jobs on LinkedIn, especially when they are building out a new team. You can create a LinkedIn job alert for jobs posted from your target company and understand the direction that the company is going in.3.

3. SpyOnWeb Is your competition a publisher who owns multiple sites but you’re just not sure what the portfolio looks like? Well, spyonweb.com can help solve this mystery for you by figuring out what websites share the same IP address and even Adsense or Analytics IDs! Creepy but effective. You can enter either a domain, IP address, GA ID or Adsense publisher ID. Did I say no spy hacks? Damn.

Other notable mentions: Alexa Traffic Rank, Owler

Product: I’m only going to focus on tools that help analyze web-based products. There’s a lot of tools that can also help you with insights on apps.

1. Builtwith Easiest way to understand on your competitor site’s building blocks, including the technology used, start and end dates of plugins used. As a bonus, this tool can also help you figure out if your prospective customers are using your comeptitor’s solutions (if it is a tech integration) or using nothing at all! A neat little Chrome extension that has a freemium offering, you get access to the latest information and an API with the paid version

2. PageSpeed Insights This one is a bit controversial (check Airbnb or Reddit’s PageSpeed scores) as it’s not always necessary that a well-optimized quick loading page leads to success (I’m joking — it’s almost never necessary). However, as markets continue to get saturated with similar products, a better user experience in terms of page loading time can be a differentiator. Sort of. In any case, this also comes with an extension and insights on HOW to reduce page load time (tip: lazy load, always). If images are your concern, you can use Squoosh for compression!

3. Dataprovider.com Quick and dirty information about your competitor’s website? Use the free Dataprovider extension to get an insight into some important indicators developed by them — economic footprint (estimate of the size of business), trust grade and a heart beat (to check how actively the site is updated) Tip: Always check global websites with a VPN service. Recommendations, user flow and offerings generally change with locations. Customers and content: Now the fun begins. Understandably, there are a lot of tools in the market to help you figure your competitor’s content and marketing strategies. A few such gems are -

4. Taboola trends Yeah, I know. No one likes those spammy native ads that you see on most news publications these days. But you have to admit, discovery ad platforms Taboola and Outbrain (recently merged) are a pretty big deal in the online marketing world. This is a neat little tool to help you unlock valuable content insights from their large database! You can get valuable insights on trends that work by category, region, language and device!! For example, they can tell you if black and white images work better in EU for home & garden category than coloured. Or predict success of your content tile. Or show you trends of popular phrases Who knew, huh?

5. Outbrain Brainpower Another treasure trove of insights on content by region and vertical. An interesting section of their insights is the Vertical Insights, which can tell you what content can see a better ad CTR, conversion rates by publisher content category and some broad guidelines on content consumption by day of week and device

6. Google Trends Google trends is a real-time trend analyser and helps you gauge interest in a brand, your competitor or even your industry. You can search and compare multiple search terms like I’ve done below. You can filter this by country, time period and by source (web, images etc). The tool helps you plan your content calendar and figure out what content to create. You can also track seasonal trends and release content at the right time.

7. Advanced Google Search

God, I really am not sure how many of us use this tool but I’ve met a lot of folks who are simply in awe when they discover this feature and possibilities of better and smarter search. You can use complex search queries and get narrow, focused results. For instance, you can choose to get results only if your entire search term is included in the results and further refine it with location, date and even a domain filter (yes, you basically check the latest content updated by a domain you are tracking with this tool). One cool feature of Advanced Google Search is that they even help you figure out images that can be used without a license. There’s a whole slew of tools that can help you uncover your SEO potential by understanding opportunity areas and competitor space. A few cool ones are Blue Corona, SerpStat, Raven tools and Ahrefs. Marketing: Do you need to figure out what paid strategies are your competitor using and how effective they are? Do not fret — every tool in the market is competing to help you figure that out seamlessly. You can also figure out what paid traffic sources are being used by your competitors and on if your competitor is a publisher who makes money by running ads, how lucrative are his placements!

1. Pixel helpers — Facebook, Bing UET Helper, Google Tag Assistant, Taboola Pixel, Outbrain Pixel Tracker These pixel helpers not only help you debug your integration but also help you to check if your competitor’s landing page are using this as a paid source. Sure, this will just be an indicator of the presence or absence of the conversion pixel on your competitor’s landing page but using this tool along with other PPC spy tools (discussed below) can give you a good idea of your competitor’s paid advertising strategy. A lot of times, these pixel helpers also help you understand CTAs that are most important to your competitor and their general user flow

2. Facebook Ads Facebook’s push to be more transparent about advertisers has opened a few spying opportunities. You can quickly check on your competitor’s Facebook page and click on the Page Transparency section. From there, you will be able to see if your competitor is running ads. When you go to the Ad Library, you can see all their ads, running or paused with a filter for Country. Isn’t this perfect?!

3. Headerbidder Expert A simple extension that shows you bidders for ad inventory on a domain and the time taken by them to respond. Very helpful in debugging your own inventory and figuring out what your target publisher has access to!

4. Anstrex, WhatRunsWhere, SEMRush, SpyFu & iSpionage These are the most comprehensive PPC and SEO tracking tools in the martech industry. SEMRush, iSpionage and SpyFu help you identify your organic as well as paid competitors, monitor your competitor’s search rankings, identify potential opportunities to gain organic share with keyword gap analysis, identify link building opportunities for backlinks, track your competitor’s paid search traffic, budget and keywords, find new profitable keywords and the list goes on. Anstrex helps you track ads (creative, text, engagement, landing page) on push as well as native platforms — they track almost EVERY push and native network there is out there. WhatRunsWhere also helps you monitor ads on native and display ad platforms. There are way too many tools out there to help you shape your content & marketing strategy. The list may seem daunting, but you can spend some time understanding their features and figure out ones with the largest overlap with your requirements. Most of them have a freemium model that allow you to get a good sense of how their service can benefit your business.