Once you’ve decided on a niche for your business, tracking your competitors is crucial to building your company. While you should always find a good balance between monitoring your competition and building your own business, keeping pace with other companies in your field can help give you insight into the market and track market changes before they happen.
Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to help you monitor your competitors. Here are five ways to monitor your competitors using social media tools, SEO extensions, and Google add-ons.
Facebook Page Watch
Facebook Insights has a “Pages to Watch” feature that you can use to monitor your competition. By seeing how their page growth compares to your own and the different social media campaigns the company runs, you can get a good idea of how your company’s progress compares. Facebook Insights allows you to watch up to 100 pages, track engagement across several pages, and get a good benchmark of how your company compares to other social media accounts in your niche.
Remember that you should prioritize which pages you watch using this program, as tracking 100 pages may feel productive, but it will consume a large portion of your time. So instead, start by targeting your largest competitors and use the other slots to track smaller, more innovative companies to see how their pages compare.
You can add pages to your watch list on Facebook by going to Insights, then Overview, and adding pages to your watch list. In addition, you can find a detailed update to the Facebook Insights tab in their most recent 2022 update.
Facebook Ad Library
Similar to tracking your competitors’ pages, tracking their ad campaigns can give you great insight into your competitors’ marketing strategies. Facebook’s page transparency commitment has created a great way to check your competition’s ad campaigns. First, go to the Facebook Ad Library, and enter your competitor’s name into the search bar. This service should show all ads run by your competitor.
The benefits of knowing what kinds of ads your competition runs are twofold. First, it helps you narrow down your advertising campaigns by seeing the keywords and marketing strategies run by other businesses and what niche they’re recently targeting. Secondly, seeing the ads run by your competition allows you to see what worked for them and what didn’t, cutting down on your advertising campaign failures by proxy.
Of course, seeing what other companies put in their advertisements doubles as keyword research. You can track what wording engages users the most and what promotions perform the best in their targeted niche.
Tools and Add-Ons
You can use several add-ons, extensions, and tools to track your competitors and find out facts about their marketing campaigns. We’ve included a couple of our favorites to get you started, but keep in mind that depending on what niche your business targets, you may find other add-ons more valuable than others. Researching competition monitoring add-ons and different platforms and programs that offer valuable marketing insights can benefit your business.
Semrush
Semrush allows you to track several different aspects of your competition at once. Their SEO add-on lets you see how your competition’s website follows from an SEO perspective, including their overall ranking, website build, and targetted niches. This can be incredibly useful when determining how your business’s site compares to the competition.
Their marketing and advertising research allows you to see how different campaigns track compared to their target audience. For example, you can easily track traffic to any website and see how traffic changes correlate with an advertising campaign or a social media post. This allows you to see the real impact of your advertising campaigns and how well your competition handles their advertising.
Semrush has several other aspects to its program. Still, its SEO and marketing/social media/advertising research tools are great ways to track your competitors and get actionable insight for your next advertising campaign.
Spyfu
Spyfu has one of the coolest names of any add-on. Have you ever wanted to feel like you have a fleet of spies at your disposal? That’s what this add-on has to offer. You can check your competitors’ links, site rankings, and SEO ratings and get alerts when new competitors enter the scene. This program also allows you to track page views, engagements, and spikes in activity, offering insight into ad campaign results and competitor growth.
Of course, there’s more on offer from this program than just competitor research. Spyfu allows you to track PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns on Google, grow backlink strategies, and project organization. So if you’re looking for a competitor tracking tool with SEO-management tools worked into the program, Spyfu can be an excellent tool for your business.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is more of a generalized keyword search tool, but it can be valuable to help you track backlinks and see what your competitors are ranking for. In addition, this tool allows you to track domain history and historical results and interactions over time, allowing you to track how your and your competitors’ websites grow.
Ubersuggest also has a feature that allows you to find keywords based on competitors’ websites. This enables you to get new marketing insights and niches based on how your competitors build their websites.
Read Reviews
Reading customer reviews on your competitors’ sites can be a great way to monitor their progress. Not only does this give you great insight into the satisfaction levels of their customers, but it can also show you ways you can outperform your competitors.
Reading reviews may be time-consuming, but it can offer valuable insight into your competitors and their customer service. You can also see an uptick in customer engagement due to increased reviews and potential deals or changes in company direction. Of course, you can also see if your competition uses pay-per-review services or other shady growth practices that allow you a chance to outperform and outrank them.
Read Comments
This goes hand-in-hand with reading reviews, but reading the comments on your competitor’s website and social media pages can give you a good idea of their engagement levels. Another thing to check when searching competitor comment sections is any hidden comments. This can provide insight into less-than-satisfied customers and less-than-stellar customer service practices. Much like with reviews, an increase in comments can show higher customer engagement numbers, and when paired with ad campaign research, it can give you a good idea of your competition’s marketing plan.
Take the Hassel out of Monitoring Your Competition
If you’re interested in tracking your competition, we offer competitor research as a standalone service or a combo with any of our other offers. This allows you to take advantage of years of professional marketing experience and frees your attention to focus on other business management decisions. If you’re interested in finding out more about our competitor monitoring services or would like to take advantage of our small business deals, contact Planted Marketing today.
Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency created for small to mid-size businesses, start-ups, and personal brands. We customize our plans to fit the business at each stage of growth. Want to learn more? Send us a message at info@plantedmarketing.com. Talk soon!
