We’ve all been looking over our shoulder and watching our competition way before entering the world of business. Humans are in nature very competitive beings. It doesn’t matter whether in a sports team, or a classroom - we’ve always wanted to know where the limit was set by those we see as competition, and we go one step further. It’s all about setting bigger goals and finding new opportunities.
When it comes to the digital age, the list of different factors taken into consideration when spying on your competition is enormous. This is where competitor analysis tools come in handy. Time and time again, a proper competitor analysis has proven paramount to making a marketing strategy work. The lack of such analysis equals disaster. Simple as that. Fear not though, here is a list of the best tools for spying on your competition.
Make sure you never fall behind them ever again.
Fanpage Karma
Fanpage Karma is one of the best tools for doing a side-by-side comparison. The tool compares your accounts to your competitor’s. It analyzes profiles across different platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest. It’s still far from perfect though, as it shows the most detailed report Facebook, while the rest are mostly basic.
Among other metrics, the free comparative analytics cover:
- Growth
- Most-used content sources and keywords
- Engagement
- Top posts
- Frequency
- Engagement by day and time
- Post type and supporters
Still, the great thing about this tool is that the free plan can be really useful.
It offers a detailed analysis for
-1 fan page
- Basic dashboard
- Weekly reports and alerts
- 90 day analysis period
The premium detailed analytics can track keywords and content source engagement.
Also, success by: - Post type
- Influencers
- Post length
- Post history, and more.
The tool’s interface allows visual assessment of your page’s strengths and weaknesses. It does that by instantly displaying comparative charts and graphs. You can also dig deeper into the keyword tool, timing tool, and content types. Also, it enables you to understand the “why” behind the data. This, in turn, allows making critical adjustments to the strategy to increase performance.
PowerAdSpy
Don't know how to track competitors activities like ads strategies, ad copy, landing pages, and the target audience? Then you should check out PowerAdSpy. This tool performs all these things with pretty good accuracy. We’ve been using this tool for quite some time and it has met most expectations. It’s surely one of the best Facebook ads competitor analysis tools that can help any business to find out the best running ads of their competitors.
One of the features that this tool offers are:
- Filtering ads according to your niche
- Customizing the search
- Collecting ads from 15+ countries
- Labeling the best running ads
- Call to based oriented categorizing
- Filtering ads according to exact keywords
- Spying on your competitor's tactics
Sprout Social
With the help of Sprout Social, you can acquire and organize a ton of social media data without a single spreadsheet. One of the best features of the tool is the Facebook Competitors Report. With this, you can compare your growth with competitive pages without having to creep on their social media day after day. They also offer the same insights for competitive analytics on Instagram too.
With this kind of information and metrics, competitive analysis can be a rather passive process. You don’t need to chase around your competitors, because you’ll have constant insight in your competition’s performance.
Check out what your competition and audience are buzzing about with Sprout’s social listening features. Additionally, you can track discussions around the latest topics emerging in your area.
Awario
With Awario, you can find out several key elements, some of which are:
- Which social media platforms are most used by your competitors
- Which campaigns resonate best with their audience
- What are your competitors’ patterns of posting
- How their content is being distributed
You’ll be able to set up an alert for any competitor and see insights. These can be used to point out where most mentions come from, and which type of content is the best fit for each network. Such an example would be to see if the competition uses Youtube for entertainment or interaction with users, and Twitter for news or how-tos.
Another would be knowing what social media channel is the most effective. In the same manner, you can create an alert for a hashtag or a campaign name. This enables gathering data on shares, discussions, and mentions across all major social networks and the web. According to your discoveries, you can note the efforts that were in vain too. But not only that - you’ll discover the great ideas that can be extended and the mistakes that should be avoided too.
Likealyzer
Likealyzer allows you to do a health check of your competitors Facebook pages. Additionally, Likealyzer checks different elements of your page by different measures. Such elements are timing, page information, responsiveness and post type. It also provides the best tips for improving your page. To give an example, the type of content you should focus on and when to post to get the strongest engagement.
Likealyzer is the perfect tool when you want to perform a quick check on your page. But, you’ll get the most value out of it if you use it to analyze multiple competitors.
Pay attention to the suggestions for other pages to determine where your brand can set up and take the lead.
Even though it doesn’t do a comparison like Fanpage Karma, the gathered data is presented in such a way that you can easily take screenshots. You can then import multiple analysis pages into a document for a competitive comparison. Likealyzer has its scoring system used to assign each page on a rank between 1 and 100, as well as averages within the industry and similar brands.
Google Alerts
This great tool by Google not only helps monitor your mentions but also your competitors’. With Google Alerts you can see when your competitor has been mentioned by brand name, keywords, or both. Additionally, if you don’t want to be annoyed by a barrage of emails, you can limit how often you receive an alert.
For example, you can request to receive immediate alerts as soon as a fresh mention arrives. Or, you can limit alerts to once a day. Our tip is to identify the topics your competitors are writing about - this will help you get quality links. If the topics are good, maybe you should tap into the most popular ones and come up with your unique content approach.
If you like to get sneaky (which every marketer should always be), don’t just limit yourself to monitoring competitor sites. Identify the best businesses who got a similar audience to yours and monitor their digital marketing efforts too.
Final Words
For any business to be successful in this increasingly competitive digital environment, it must stay one step ahead from competitors. To do that, the business must understand other’s mistakes and failures and avoid them. This will contribute toward using the budget toward efforts that will bring the most results.
With a strategic approach combined with these powerful tools, chances are that you’ll be able to learn even more from both the wins and losses of your competition. Use that insight to make better decisions for your own business.
If you enjoyed this read, feel free to check out our previous blog on The Best Tips for Increasing Your Organic Reach on Social Media. Also, don’t forget to Subscribe to Our Newsletter!
