Tools for Analysing and Tracking Your Competitors

One of the neat things about business online is that you can keep a close eye on your competition. You get to inspect their sites and sample their service in a totally anonymous environment. There are also an abundance of tools for analysing and tracking competitors, allowing you to quantify their traffic, see how their site has changed, find out details about their domain, be alerted when they are in the press and lots of other things.

While many tools for analysing things like traffic are only approximate, when you are watching competitors any information is useful. So today I’ve rounded up a list of tools I use regularly to add to your toolbox of website espionage! My main reasons for using these tools are for:

1. Assessing Partnership Opportunities On a fairly regular basis companies will contact us about partnership or business development opportunities. I must say hardly any of these seem to pan out, but at least with a traffic tool I can assess whether the site has a shot at providing something useful in return.
2. Investigating new markets Whenever we launch a site in a new area the first thing we do is go hunting for competitors. While its good to take every competitor seriously, there are some who are perhaps more serious. Analysing sites is a good way to separate the wolves from the sheep.
3. Comparing Performance I regularly watch and compare traffic between our sites and competing sites. I’m usually looking to see if we’re slipping behind, surging ahead or going neck and neck. This might give me an idea of whether our marketing is effective, if we are missing some crucial traffic sources and what the overall trends are.
4. Monitoring the Competition It’s a good idea to know what your competition is up to. Using feeds, alerts and searches you can track mentions of them on the web to see when a new feature, bit of press or even disgruntlement arises. You have to watch out for information overload, but setting an occasional monitoring schedule can help with this.

Traffic Analysis

Given how vital traffic is to web work, it’s no surprise that traffic estimation tools are probably the most useful of all the sites listed in this post. They aren’t necessarily accurate – in fact they are notoriously inaccurate – but you can still get some good information out of them.

• Alexa’s Traffic RankingsAlexa.com/siteinfo
  Despite being widely and often panned, Alexa is my favourite tool. It’s quick and I love the browser add-on. A couple of weeks ago they redesigned and updated their algorithm because of late our Envato sites have risen far in the rankings. On the whole Alexa isn’t great for figuring out small traffic trends and often shows random fluctuations which have no basis in reality (when you check your own sites you can see this pretty quickly). Nonetheless Alexa has a few strengths. First, it estimates traffic for even tiny sites. Second, it seems to be improving continually. Third, it looks at global traffic. On the whole I think it’s a useful tool and I make use of it regularly.
• Compete Traffic EstimatorCompete.com
  My second favourite traffic tool is Compete. It only estimates US traffic and isn’t so great for smaller sites. However it feels more accurate on traffic trends than Alexa often does. Also it actually gives you a traffic count whereas Alexa provides things like ranking and reach (the latter of which I still don’t understand!) There are some premium options on Compete, but being the cheap guy that I am, I only ever use the free options
• Google Trends for WebsitesTrends.google.com
  Google Trends launched last year and has proven quite useful. It has two modes, one being to display trends in search terms and the other to measure websites. My feeling is it’s a relatively accurate traffic measurement, though it only works on reasonably large sites. Given the amount of information available to Google, I’d hazard a guess that Trends will only get better and better in the years to come.
• Also Ran: QuantcastQuantcast.com
  In my opinion Quantcast sucks pretty bad. Most of our Envato websites are listed with traffic numbers that are as much as 50 to 200x off. That’s a pretty huge factor to be off by. I guess Quantcast might be good for really big sites, but that’s not that useful. There is an option to let Quantcast actually measure your traffic (by installing a script) but not that many sites do it. On the whole, I avoid this tool, though I mention it here for completeness sake.

Site Analysis

There are quite a few other ways you can analyse a site beyond its traffic. Information on how a site has looked in the past, its optimization for search, the whois information for the domain and so on are easy to get and useful in different situations.

• Web Archive – Competitor’s Site HistoryWeb.Archive.org/web
  The Way-Back-Machine is a non-profit site that has recorded some 85 billion pages in an archive of the web. It’s pretty amazing and can make for some entertaining looks at how sites used to look. When it comes to established competitors, it’s great to look back and see how their sites used to look, often with revealing information about how they’ve grown, membership numbers at different times in history and so on.
• Website Grader – General Site InformationWebsite.grader.com
  Hubspot’s Website Grader is a neat little tool that runs a whole lot of different services and queries over your site to return a score out of 100. I’m pretty dubious about the score (a lot of our sites seem to get 99.99) but the information below is really useful. Not only are there recommendations on what could be improved but lots of stats. There’s also a feature to compare with other sites, perfect for seeing how you line up against the competition.
• Yahoo Site Explorer – Find Out Who’s Linking to a CompetitorSiteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
  Finding out who links to a competitor is a good way to find sites to try to get links from yourself. This is particularly true if you are just entering the market and aren’t sure what sites might be interested in your offerings. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is a good way to find “inlinks” to any domain.
• Xinu Returns – General SEO InformationXinureturns.com
  When it comes to general SEO information, XinuReturns is a neat little page that pulls data from a whole ton of sources. Some of it is replicated in the Website Grader above, but there are lots of other services it polls for data as well.
• Domain Tools – WhoIs Look ups and MoreDomainTools
  DomainTools is a handy set of services for getting information about a domain. The most prominent tool is a WhoIs search to find out domain owner details. If you pay a subscription you can even get historical WhoIs data – useful for domains that are privacy protected but didn’t used to be! There’s also a lot of other neat services like an alert service for when people use your trademark in a domain, and a tool to find misspellings of your domain name and who registered them.

Feed Analysis

If you operate a blog or a competing with blogs, then there are two neat tools for monitoring/analysing feeds.

• PostRankPostRank
  Previously called AideRSS, this tool lets you quickly analyse a given RSS feed to find what items are popular, handy for figuring out what people are interested in so you can immitate!
• FeedCompareFeedCompare
  This is a simple tool for tracking how a feed has grown over time. The feed needs to be through the Feedburner service and given how flakey Feedburner can be you can expect to see some pretty wild fluctuations, check out this comparison of ZenHabits, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb for a graph showing some crazy lines.

Monitoring

Tracking what happens online is a lot easier than you might think thanks to a host of tools available. It should be mentioned that this sort of monitoring should not only be done for competitor brands but for your own brands. When you do it internally this is called Online Reputation Monitoring.

• Google Alerts & Yahoo AlertsGoogle.com/alerts and Alerts.yahoo.com
  Both Google and Yahoo Alerts let you set up email digests of news and links from around the web. Yahoo gives you a huge variety of options for creating alerts allowing you to create alerts specific to different services. Both take keywords to look out for and email you whenever they appear on the radar.
• Monitor ThisAlp-Uckan.net
  MonitorThis lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds in one aggregated feed. It’s easy to use and very convenient – though it can generate an awful lot of feed items!
• TweetBeepTweetBeep.com
  TweetBeep is an external service that provides an Alerts service for Twitter’s Search. It’s great for keeping track of mentions of your name, brand, and URL (even if it’s been shortened).
• Twitter …Twitter.com
  OK well I think everyone knows Twitter, but nonetheless I’ll mention it anyway. These days it seems like everyone is on Twitter, including your competitors. Create an account, follow them all and pay attention to what they say. I know personally I’m constantly leaking information about Envato. Often its deliberate, but I’m pretty sure I’ve said things in the past that give insights into our operations.

Know Any Other Tools?

So that’s my list of tools for staying on top of the competition. Do you know of any more for the list?