Marketer’s ultimate guide to researching competitors: 14 best services for competitive intelligence

The success of a business depends on a number factors, one of the most important being the ability to understand and adapt to your competitors. Effective response to their strategies can have a significant impact on the business promotion.

What is the issue? Collection and analysis of huge amounts of competitive data. This is where competitor tracking tools can help.

This article will introduce you to the 14 best tools for marketers to keep an eye on your competitors online. It will also discuss the benefits of using each of them.

What is a competitive intelligence service?

This is a service that allows companies to collect and analyze information about their competitors: understand what they are doing, track their marketing activities, interactions and overall performance.

Marketing specialists use CI tools to learn from their competitors, anticipate their moves, identify gaps and opportunities in the market, stay abreast of industry trends, and develop competitive strategies that help their business to stay ahead of the curve.

How to use competitive intelligence tools to grow your business?

Competitive intelligence tools make it easy to collect, analyze, and disseminate competitive research, especially when dealing with astronomical volumes of data and dozens of players in the market.

These tools typically rely on artificial intelligence and automation that do the heavy lifting for experts. Here are five ways you can use competitive intelligence tools to grow your business.

Identify gaps in the market

Competitive intelligence tools allow you to analyze the market and identify any unmet needs or areas that competitors may be overlooking. This gives business a chance to step in and fill these gaps.

For instance, a health food brand might notice growing interest in keto diets and discover that none of its competitors offer keto products. By filling this gap, a company can potentially capture a new market segment while positioning itself as an innovator.

Respond quickly to new threats

What if your competitor releases a new product that directly competes with your flagship offering? What if they announce a merger that could significantly impact your sales? Too late detection can spell disaster for your business.

Competitive intelligence tools can help you to stay on top of these events. For example, you could quickly gather information about competitors' new products, such as features, pricing, and initial customer response.

Benchmarking of competitors using these tools will allow you to use the data to develop a counter-strategy, such as a new campaign, discount, or innovative feature. You can even anticipate threats before they actually happen and take action to minimize or prevent damage to your business.

Improve business strategy

Competitive intelligence helps to make smart, data-driven decisions. Competitor data are a key element of business intelligence. Whether it's adjusting prices, developing new features, increasing budgets, or partnering with other firms, market knowledge directly impacts the business strategy.

The competitors monitoring also helps to evaluate your own performance and learn about your company's strengths and weaknesses. Do you need to post more engaging content? Could customer service be better? Is the product missing any important feature?

Follow industry trends

Using CI tools is not just about spying on competitors. They are also designed to track trends relevant to business, such as popular hashtags, trending topics, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Keeping track of industry trends and participating in the conversation helps a business to stay relevant. You also show innovativeness and flexibility as you continually make efforts to update your branding, content, products and services in response to changes in the market.

Understand customer sentiment

Sentiment analysis, being a core function of competitive intelligence, provides insight into what customers think and feel about certain brands and topics. It uses artificial intelligence to identify and analyze the emotions behind online reviews, mentions and conversations.

Understanding of sentiment helps to deliver better experiences and improve customer satisfaction. More importantly, you can quickly take action to prevent negative word of mouth from spreading and damaging your business's reputation.

Top 14 tools for searching for competitive insights

1. Adheart.me

Adheart.me is a popular spy service that helps to analyze competitors’ advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

With Adheart you can:

● analyze advertising campaigns of competitors – what products and how they advertise, when they release new products, what texts, creatives and landing pages of competitors look like, how the audience responses to their advertising;

● find creatives from competitors and peers, and use them in your advertising campaigns – the massive daily updated database includes advertising campaigns on all topics. Adheart will assist you to understand which creatives work, which are popular and which may be trending in the near future – thanks to this, you can adjust your own advertising campaigns and test new approaches;

● find working links: the service monitors all advertising that has ever been launched through Facebook, and a large number of filters and the ability to work with search variables AND/OR make it easy to find keys and approaches that can later be used in your own campaigns;

● search for insights: track creatives in your niche by keywords, links, offers and platforms;

● uniqualize creatives and quickly create UTM tags: simplify your work on advertising campaigns using the built-in uniqueizer and UTM builder.

For more information on how to use Adheart, read the instructions.

2. YouScan

Social networks and media are one of the main sources of competitive intelligence. This is where most customers are and where they interact with brands.

YouScan is an AI-powered platform for collecting and analyzing data from social media and other online sources with the world's best image analysis functionality. The product is used by major consumer brands (B2C) to manage their online reputation, find marketing insights, and compare the perception of their products with competitors.

3. Similarweb

Similarweb is a powerful competitive intelligence tool that gives you a comprehensive visual understanding of your competitors' digital presence.

This platform allows you to study traffic, engagement, marketing channels, keywords, content, and pay-per-click advertising campaigns on up to 25 competitor websites simultaneously. You can also compare your performance with your competitors and track their metrics over time.

4. LOOQME

LOOQME is a communication monitoring and analytics platform that collects, structures and visualizes mentions of a brand and competitors in media and social networks.

This platform allows you to track brand mentions online, offline and on social networks without manual search, which makes it possible to immediately detect negativity and respond to it in a timely manner. Tracking can be done both for your own business and for competitors and the market – the service enables to evaluate benchmarks, market trends and competitors in any context and format, as well as understand the vector of their development. All the data received are collected in a dashboard and formed into various reports that can be shared with colleagues.

5. Reputation.com

Reputation specializes in analyzing customer reviews. Along with this, Reputation offers competitive intelligence tools to track, compare and analyze competitor data.

Create a custom dashboard to compare individual competitors and performance metrics, track customer sentiment in real time, and use artificial intelligence to identify strengths and weaknesses.

You can also track trends and opportunities, get recommendations from the platform, and create visual reports on competitors to share with your team or management.

6. Klue

Klue is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that simplifies the process of collecting, analyzing and sharing competitive data.

Gather competitive information from a variety of sources, create and share battle maps, profiles, and dashboards with your team, analyze market trends and competitor strategies, and distribute information directly within your existing technology package, including Slack and Salesforce.

7. Visualping

Visualping is a website monitoring tool that allows you to track changes on certain pages. You can set up alerts to notify your team when there are updates, such as a new landing page design, a price drop, or a new banner ad.

This tool also offers advanced AI analysis so that you can pinpoint what's changed, compare with previous versions, and view visual and text summaries. You can also invite more people and send notifications via email or popular apps like Slack, Google Sheets, and Teams.

8. Insightsfirst

Insightsfirst is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform from Evalueserve. It collects

competitive data from various sources, centralizes and filters them, and then disseminates the information through alerts, integrations, and newsletters.

Access information on industry trends and forecasts, track and analyze competitive news, and present information in an easily digestible manner using data visualizations.

9. Crayon

Crayon is an AI-powered competitive intelligence tool that helps sales teams to analyze and use competitive data to close deals.

This platform summarizes, prioritizes, and delivers analytics directly to email, helps to create content that drives sales, and even shows you data on how your team is using competitive analytics.

10. Data.ai

Data.ai (formerly known as App Annie) provides analytics and information about the mobile app market. Track competitor data such as top-performing apps, downloads, engagement, revenue, usage, app features, and even advertisements.

Identify threats by analyzing performance trends in your app category, track growth and ranking data over time, and monitor competitor app market share.

11. Contify

Contify collects data from over 500,000 customizable sources, including websites, social media, and press releases.

It also analyzes these data using machine learning, presenting it visually using special dashboards. You can also disseminate competitive intelligence through curated news feeds, automated emails, news APIs, and branded newsletters.

The tool also offers a website change tracker that helps you to stay on top of competitor strategies like pricing changes, rebrands, design tweaks, new deals, display ads and more.

12. Semrush

Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools, furthermore it comes with additional powerful features enabling you to stay ahead of the competition.

The platform offers tools to analyze your competitors' website traffic, backlinks, paid advertising campaigns, the keywords they rank for, and even their social media performance.

The Semrush Market Explorer tool also gives you an overview of any industry or niche enabling to track growth trends, audience and traffic, as well as identify leaders and new players.

13. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another well-known SEO platform that offers reliable competitive intelligence tools. In particular, their Site Explorer allows you to double down on your competitors' websites and analyze their top organic keywords, backlinks, pages, content and many more.

Fun fact – this tool boasts the fastest backlink search in the industry and the largest database of live backlinks. Additionally, you can use the Content Explorer to find popular content and link building opportunities in your niche.

14. Media Radar

Media Radar is an advertising analytics platform that allows you to compare your competitors' advertising campaigns and media buying strategies with your own ones.

Compare advertising investments, view ads in various formats, analyze messages, and find out where your competitors are advertising.

Track your competitors' campaigns with Adheart

Monitoring the competitors’ activities and analyzing their strategic moves helps a business to make timely and more effective decisions in all aspects. More importantly, it helps you to stay relevant, innovative and competitive in your industry.

Use Adheart to make launching Facebook advertising campaigns easier and faster. Find trends, new creative approaches and study the characteristics of markets in different countries to get the most out of your advertising campaigns. If you need several accounts for your team, contact Adheart support – we will help you to choose the optimal subscription plan with a corporate discount.