There is this tiny but profound shift in mindset that has turned our industry upside down. Competition is not something that causes fear any longer.
Marketers, in truth, are now encouraged by their rivals. In your room, getting other players validates that there’s a demand for what you offer. This implies that there are approaches out there that work.
To elevate your business, you can imitate and build on these strategies. Stalking your rivals is not a ticket to success that is assured. It’s just a single piece of a complicated puzzle.
Don’t be discouraged, no matter how dynamic of a landscape you work in. Spying on your rivals will reinforce your position in the market.
Let’s unleash the power of spying tools and see how they can help you stand out in the crowd.
What are Spying Tools?
Monitoring your competition is something that every entrepreneur must accomplish frequently. Spying tools give you a chance and a blueprint to one-up your competition. They allow you to understand how the market responds, what the new trends are, and always position and prepare to be one step ahead of others.
The purpose of these tools is to identify new opportunities and set targets based on someone you need to win (or stay ahead of).
There are a million distinct factors to consider when spying on our competitors in a world where analysis is critical and comprehensive. This is where spying tools come into action.
A question might have popped up in your mind by now: “how can Spy tools give me insights into my competitors?” Well, we’ll tell you how!
How Do Spying Tools Help In Keeping Track of Competitors?
Spying tools keep an eye on the digital marketing tactics of your competitors, what content or what keywords they are using, and so on. Spying tools are used to understand what gives your competitors certain outcomes. And you can also understand why they are outperforming you.
It’s also a way to figure out what you are doing better than your competitors, so you can continue to shine. Spying tools give you a perfect opportunity for benchmarking so that you can understand how well your marketing activities are paying off.
It can be shocking for you to find that your business competitors are going to spy on you too! They’ll want to know what they can do to improve themselves, for instance:
- You rank higher in search engines. They may want to climb up the ladder.
- You are driving more social media interaction. They may want to know how their social media strategy can be improved to produce the same results as you.
- Your company blog is making waves in your niche. They would want to enhance their content further so that they can stand next to you.
As you can see, spying on your competitors is not about stealing their secrets; instead, it’s a way to understand their strategy and learn more about your audience.
Here is how Spying tools work and help in keeping track of your competitors:
- They help in determining your competitor’s backlinks.
- Help in monitoring each of your competitor’s social media activities
- Spy tools gather all the information about your competitors in one place.
- They help in obtaining insights into your audience.
- Find competitors keyword data (paid and organic)
- Help in visiting competitor’s sites and saving content that might be useful to you
- Analyze the highest and lowest domains of the links of your competitors
So, the next question comes, what are the best spying tools out there that you can use to spy on your competitors? Don’t worry, we have compiled a list specially handpicked for your needs.
List of Spying Tools to Keep an Eye on Competitors
You need to know the business environment and adapt to it wisely to run a successful company. That means understanding what works for your niche, what doesn’t work for your niche, and ultimately, what can be done better.
But instead of learning the hard way (from your own mistakes), there is a lot you can take out to give yourself the upper hand from the experience of your competitors.
Let’s look at some great tools that can simplify the process and provide more detailed, actionable insights to make spying enjoyable and prevent it from being too daunting.
1. SpyFu
I bet you know your biggest competitors target the same markets, customer segments, and provide the same services.
You can try SpyFu, a keyword analysis tool that offers insights into who your organic online rivals are, and which are their most profitable keywords, to begin your investigation.
In addition to this, SpyFu will also examine the keywords that just made it to the top, just dropped out, or are ‘almost there’, which will give you an idea of where the efforts of your competitors are currently centered.
Spyfu offers a ‘Battle’ diagram, which shows the target keywords you share with your competitors, those you might be missing on, and the unprofitable ones you probably should drop, is another useful component.
Function: Recognizes your business competitors and their keyword winners
What does the free version offer?
It shows five keywords + five competitors for any domain.
2. Website Auditor
WebSite Auditor collects the SEO competitors that rank on page one for any desired keyword(s) automatically and demonstrate the anatomy of those winning pages: how exactly they are optimized and how strategies differ from competitor to competitor.
For each feature on a list, you can see the optimization stats and all the tech insights.
Function: Reveals the optimization and link-building tactics of your competitors
What does the free version offer?
WebSite Auditor allows up to 150 pages to be audited against ten competitors.
3. SEMRush
You can dig into your competitors’ ad strategies and PPC marketing practices with the help of SEMRush and investigate their most lucrative paying keywords and the most popular ad campaigns. All you need to do is enter your competitor’s domain name!
Seeing approximate budgets of your competitors and analyzing how some advertising is performed, you will benefit from their experience with your own company without a loss and wisely change your budget.
Function: Discovers the paying keywords of your competitors, the best ad copies, and the best ad publishers
What does the free version offer?
SEMRush displays ten keywords, and ten ad copies per domain provides a 14-day trial needed for card information.
4. SimilarWeb Pro
The SimilarWeb Pro is another fantastic tool to keep an eye on your rivals and discover actionable ideas. The tool gives you all sorts of insights into the traffic levels, origins, and distribution of competitors through the networks.
In addition to this, the interaction that comes with that traffic is also illustrated by SimilarWeb. You can keep track of their average daily visits, average visit length, number of pages per visit, and bounce rate.
Another thing to use is your competitor’s choice for audience insights, which offers geographical data (percentage of traffic sent by each country) and the preferences of the audience (categories and topics). This knowledge can be a good foundation for creating new ideas for content, tailoring it to each audience, and appealing to the correct values.
Function: Uncovers the amount of traffic from your competitors, key sources, and results
What does the free version offer?
A 3-month trial, allowing five domains to be compared, showing five results per metric.
5. Awario
You can examine a variety of main elements with a social analytics tool like Awario at hand. Keep track of which social media sites are the most popular with your competitors, which media ads resonate best with their audience, what are the trends of posting to social networks by your competitors, and how the content is circulated among them.
For any competitor, you can set up an alert, and you can see all the insights. Where the mentions come from first, and what form of content is better suited for each network. Maybe their Twitter is widely used to entertain or connect with users, while Facebook is more effective for news or how-tos.
You can also generate a warning for a campaign name or hashtag in the same way to collect information on mentions, shares, and interactions through major social networks and the web. You can mention the attempts that were in vain, the brilliant ideas that can be expanded, and the errors that should be avoided in the future, depending on what you discover.
As a bonus, you can monitor the tone your competitors use with consumers during social media listening, and the way they treat the feedback. Be it reviews around the site or mentions or responses on social networks. With a solution from your hand, you can either benefit from their method or even step into the conversation.
Finally, you can learn from their strengths and their weak spots to educate your own operation, based on what the audience says about your competitors.
Function: Exposes the social media tactics of your competitors
What does the free version offer?
Provides a free 14-day trial with up to 50,000 mentions and ten notifications
6. BuzzSumo
You can build a wiser content strategy with a tool like BuzzSumo (most content marketers’ right hand).
By setting up an alert for a subject (a keyword), by monitoring the content with the most social exposure, through shares and links, you can find out what resonates most within your niche.
You can also track your competitor’s best-performing content by monitoring their domains.
In addition to network sharing, you can also evaluate the length and structure of the content to see what suits each audience. And if you look at the best-performing content more closely and manage to identify the shared characteristics that make it so successful, you can tailor your own approach the right way!
You’ll at least be able to see if there are any hot issues that you haven’t thought of to cover, or if there’s another perspective from which to cover them.
Function: Exposes the content strategy for your competitors
What does the free version offer?
Shows 5 top copies of content for a domain and 10 for a subject, provides a complete 14-day trial with phone verification.
7. AdPlexity
AdPlexity is a leading platform for ad spying. You can track and download advertising materials (banners and landing pages) from the most common ad networks (more than 100) and ad exchanges across 75 nations and 120 carriers on the platform.
AdPlexity provides various approaches, according to the different goals. It has different versions:
- AdPlexity Mobile
- AdPlexity Native
- AdPlexity Push
- AdPlexity Desktop
- AdPlexity eCommerce
AdPlexity offers a cool variety of filters by the carrier, tracker, keyword, country, advertiser, ad size, and image. It provides stats for traffic sources, trends, placements, and publishers.
AdPlexity Carriers allow browsing mobile campaigns in foreign GEOs and use REAL 3G/LTE proxies from 80+ mobile carriers in 30+ countries.
Function: Exposes the advertisement strategies for your competitors
What does the free version offer?
Unfortunately, there is no free trial version on AdPlexity.
8. WhatRunsWhere
WhatRunsWhere is another cool ad monitoring tool that lets you study where your competitors advertise and identify the most lucrative publishers along the way.
Entry to historical data (of over five years) is a wonderful thing about the tool. This not only helps you to look at existing tactics but also offers an overview of how your competitor methods have changed over time and what they have been experimenting with.
Function: Discovers the paying keywords of your competitors, the best ad copies, and the best ad publishers
What does the free version offer?
WhatRunsWhere provides a 3-day trial involving card details.
9. SEO SpyGlass
You can evaluate a competitor’s backlink profile, its diversity, and consistency by using SEO SpyGlass. Looking at the distribution of the backlinks, the pages to which your competitor is directing the cross-correlation can be identified.
SEO SpyGlass allows you to easily connect several competitors to one project and compare the profiles. This can be incredibly useful for identifying the intersections and, respectively, the sites/authors that are likely to cover your niche frequently.
Function: Reveals the optimization and link-building tactics of your competitors
What does the free version offer?
SEO SpyGlass allows two domains to be compared at a time and displays up to 1,100 backlinks per domain.
Conclusion
You really have no choice but to remain one step ahead of your business competitors in order to thrive in the increasingly dynamic digital media climate.
Understanding the mistakes of others, and saving your budget and efforts from being cast in vain, is already a valuable takeaway. Chances are, you would be able to learn much more from their wins with the mindful approach and powerful tools in your arsenal, and then use that knowledge to make better decisions for your own business. So, what are you waiting for? Use a spy tool and stay one step ahead of your competitors!
Further reads:
The 10 Best Digital Marketing Automation Tools!
Content Generator Tools Every Marketer Needs!
