If you want to win in ecommerce one of the crucial things you need is intelligence on your competition.
Making intelligent decisions relies not only on your assumptions but using real competitor data to see how your competitors are performing.
You’ll want to learn about:
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- Your competitors’ prices
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- Your competitors’ all-in-one SEO strategies
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- Your competitors’ PPC strategies
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- Your competitors’ content marketing
Your customers have more power than you imagine. They get to decide how and when they shop, so it’s important you push yourself to go one step further than your competition.
In this blog post, we’re going to look at 13 competitive intelligence tools you can use to dominate your competition. You’ll also learn how to process and analyze the data to help you make better strategic decisions.
Let’s get started.
Content Marketing Competitive Intelligence Tools
Buzzsumo
Besides Buzzsumo’s popular service to discover top-performing content, you can also use it to gain competitor intelligence.
Buzzsumo is a practical tool to discover which of your competitors’ content has performed best and which social media channels receive high engagement.
Advanced filtering options let you deeply analyze certain topics and periods of time. Also, you can create alerts that will notify you when one of your competitors publishes new content.
Data provided by Buzzsumo can give you a good perspective as to what social channels your target customers hang out on. You can use this data to understand where you should put your social efforts.
Pricing: Starts at $99/month.
Feedly
Following dozens of industry and competitor blogs can be a time-consuming and untidy act.
Feedly will save you a lot of time and provide you with a fine-tuned component of your content marketing efforts.
You’ll notice on the right-hand side, there is a “you might also like” section that highlights content similar to the ones you’re already tracking.
Without having to manually look up each of your competitors, you’ll now have a resource that keeps you up to date with the type of content (and frequency) they have.
Pricing: Starts at $6/month.
Crayon
You can automatically capture your competitors’ movements in real-time with Crayon. More than one hundred different data types across millions of competitive intelligence sources to stay on top of product updates, emailing, executive team changes, and more: it will be easier to see what is new going on with your closest competitors.
Compared with other competitive intelligence tools, with Crayon you can create and deliver content like never before. Leverage battle cards, automated alerts, and email digests to help your colleagues compete as they mean it.
Pricing: not publicly shared.
Competitive News Intelligence Tools
Owletter
Owletter’s major focus is on gathering intelligence from competitors’ e-mail marketing. It collects all the newsletters of a competitor in a dashboard, analyzing their data and allowing you to learn from your competitors one of the most effective email marketing strategies.
You can learn how competitors set their email marketing strategies and their email behavior.
Instead of signing up for each of your competitor’s emails yourself, you sign up via Owletter and let them store and analyze the emails.
![Competitive Intelligence Tools Oweletter](png/image20-1024x538.png)
Here you can learn valuable intelligence about your competitors like how often they email, what they email about, and their email design.
Pricing: Starts at $19/month.
Social Mention
Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about your online business, a new product, or any topic about your competitors in real time.
You can monitor and track keyword mentions, company mentions, and cross-analyze what is being said across different social networks. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.
Many business owners will use social mention to monitor their own brand, but one of the hidden benefits is using it to monitor your competition.
If you can see where people are talking about them (and what they’re saying) you can come up with innovative ways to put your own brand right in the hands of people willing to talk about you.
Pricing: Free to use.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a really easy-to-use tool that will send instant reports to your mail. If you want to detect the moments your competitor is mentioned online, whether as a link or simply a mention, you’ll be notified.
Compared with other competitive intelligence tools, Google Alerts provides fewer options because Google ignored some of the forums and discussion platforms as they are considered untrustworthy.
As Google tries only to choose the most lucrative results, you’re most likely to see mentions of your competitors within press releases, news articles, or blog posts.
This will provide you with enough information to help you market your own business.
Pricing: Free to use.
Competitive Pricing Intelligence Tools
Prisync
Prisync is a competitor price tracking software for all-sized ecommerce companies. It tracks the prices/stock availability of products and sends notifications when there is a change in the market.
Additionally, it lets companies do further benchmark analysis by delivering deeply analyzed reports at the brands/categories level.
It provides the real-time data you need so you can adjust your prices for greater profit margins and improve the response speed to increase conversion rates.
Pricing: Starts at $99/month. Also for Shopify merchants, it starts at $49/month.
SEO tools
Majestic
The world’s largest link index database, Majestic, is a great SEO tool that can be effectively used to analyze the backlink catalog of your site and your competitors. If you want to outrank your competitors, you can examine their backlinks and generate potential good link sources that might help your online store to increase its rankings.
![competitive tools](jpg/image4-4-1024x572.jpg)
Here, we can see that BeardBrand has a large number of external backlinks linking to their site.
![competitive tools](png/image12-1024x371.png)
If you use the paid version of Majestic, you’ll be able to see these specific backlinks and can use that to whittle down the sites you should reach out to for backlinks, knowing they’re already linking to your competitors.
Pricing: Starts at £29/month.
Seo-Backlink Analysis
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is really helpful when you are trying to understand what links or content perform well for your site and to figure out how your competitors perform.
It’s useful for finding insights on domains and how well particular ecommerce pages perform on search engines. It helps you learn why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them by providing the data of exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for in organic search results and how much traffic this brings them.
Pricing: Starts at $99/month.
All-in-one SEO
SEMrush
SEMrush provides you with an overview of any domain’s presence across all its databases by analyzing– Bing and Google. It provides a complete SEO competitor analysis showing competitors’ best keywords and helps e-commerce companies to discover new players on the market, and see all paid strategies of them.
SEMrush gives you a more accurate estimate of your competitors’ SEO traffic, which saves a ton of time.
Pricing: Starts at $119.95/month
Spyfu
Spyfu differentiates itself as an SEO tool by helping you track your competitors’ most profitable keywords, paid ads, and organic searches.
In addition, you can make a detailed PPC analysis by finding the most profitable keywords. Just prevent money-wasting keywords and find the best ad copy.
One of the great things about Spyfu is that you only actually input one competitor. They use their software to find other competitors within your niche.
This is a useful tool if you’re not quite sure who your competitors are.
Pricing: Starts at $39/month.
Website Traffic & Analysis
Similarweb
Similarweb allows you to get traffic insights for any website. You get a global rank, country rank, and category rank of a website that you want to track, along with a nice graph that shows the weekly number of visitors in the last 6 months.
You can see how your ecommerce store and your competitors perform. By seeing how many leads come from social, search, referrals, display ads, and much more. Benchmark your online store against your competitors and industry, reveal your competitors’ online strategy, and discover new opportunities. It is one of the most useful tools to monitor your competitors’ digital strategies.
Pricing: Free to use.
Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer helps your business with the technology stack of any website. It creates lists of websites that use certain technologies, with company and contact details. You can use this tool for lead generation, market analysis, and competitor research.
It is also possible to see how your best competitors optimize their websites and explore the technology behind it.
It has many aspects: comparing market shares and technology trends, finding out what websites are built with, and monitoring website technology changes. A tool that you can find very useful and intelligent in ecommerce.
Pricing: Starts at $149/month.
Klue
For Klue, it’s about delivering actionable insights and content to the people that need it. Without competitive intelligence tools, information is just noise.
Klue makes it easy to collect and deliver data whether via email, web, mobile, or Salesforce, Klue works where you do. Importantly, collecting and analyzing the data of your business will be the goal of Klue by improving marketing competitive intelligence.
Pricing: not publicly shared.
Wrapping Up the Competitive Intelligence Tools
It is worth mentioning that in the dynamic environment of ecommerce, it is not a sustainable approach to monitor your competitors and industry manually.
You should definitely consider using or at least trying one of these tools to save time and increase your conversions.
What tools do you use to track your competitors? Have you ever used the tools mentioned above? Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments below.
Great list guys! I was particularly glad to see that you mentioned my personal favorite there, SpyFu - a tool that creates and structures its keyword results and metrics somewhat differently than its much famous competitors such as Moz Pro, KWFinder, or Ahrefs. I find its metrics more useful since it creates a far more apparent correlation with exactly how much money a keyword is worth.
I really enjoyed reading your list which I find to be diversified but comprehensive. Nice to see that you mentioned Google Alerts which is still a great tool and on top of that is free. Also was surprised to find out about some new tools which I didn't know about like Owletter.
Pleased you managed to learn about some new Tools. Owletter is a great one. Hope you manage to find some use for it :) Thanks for reading, Daniel
Pricing intelligence is synonymous to Competitive Price Monitoring. With more and more businesses going online (e-commerce is a trillion-dollar industry according to eMarketer), the dynamics in competitive price monitoring has also changed dramatically. No longer do employees walk the aisle of the competitor’s stores. Instead, companies go online and gather all the data they can. What sets modern pricing intelligence apart from other pricing models is that it makes use of data mining tools and techniques.
Thank You for your information.
Great list !!
With right data and tools one can tap the true potential that business intelligence offers.
I have read this post. Its so nice and very informative! thanks for sharing! Your website and blog is awsome!!!