Competitor(competitive) analysis in the marketing world refers to assessing the current and potential competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in-depth. This analysis helps to build both offensive and defensive strategies to perform better than the competitors in the market. It also helps to identify future threats and opportunities.
However, the problem is that most companies do not systematically strategize their plan and depend on traditional ways like collecting half-baked information about competitors and drawing informal impressions and conjectures. Such methods get inaccurate results. Therefore, it is always advisable to conduct competitor analysis for the best results at every product selection, development, and marketing stage.
Use Google Analytics to Know your Competitors
With Google Analytics, you can monitor your competitors’ footsteps. Hence, the following methods are:
- List down the names of your closest competitors.
- Go to Google Analytics. At the left-hand side of the G.A. dashboard, go to audience>technology>network.
- Network reports provide information about the number of visitors coming to your website and a list of companies in the isolated network. These companies are mostly your competitors, and you can further view them in detail to get more information.
- You can discover your competitors from the top 30 listed companies in the country and export the list in a CSV format for further competitor analysis.
- The custom segment can help you to view competitors’ activities separately. For using this feature, go to Google analytics> open the view section whose data you wish to see> Go to reports>click the +add segment button > Click +New segment > then type in a name for the segment > select ad content > type in a network domain.
- Once we got our competitors separated from the massive web traffic. Now we can analyze their traffic movements by selecting either of these segments. For doing this, click to +Add Segments > tick the segments you wish to compare.
- Important reports that can give you information about your competitors are Competitor user flow (it helps to view the traffic movement of competitors when they move through our web portal). To gain deeper insight, all pages report (tells us about our bounce rates, time on page, user engagement), go to behavior> site content > all pages. Site search ( go to acquisition > SEO, if you cannot view it, go to behavior>site search).
- You can directly view what competitors have typed in to search for your site, along with other search queries. Another report you can analyze is competitors’ engagement. It helps you to view how many users from your competitors’ page visited your site.
Advantages of Competitor Analysis
The following seven advantages were obtained from conducting competitor analysis:
- Understanding the market: With the help of competitor analysis, you can gain insight into where the market is heading. What do the customers want, and how your competitors are fulfilling the customer needs?
- Market potential forecasting: it helps to forecast the upcoming trends in your target market. It also helps to set goals according to marketing research. Competitor analysis monitors your rivals’ customer data to keep you ahead of them.
- Tertiary market possibilities: The possibility of establishing the brand at tier 3 or 4 level areas. Competitor analysis shows whether competitors are selling products in tertiary markets. This analysis helps us to explore such zones.
- Better targeting customers: Is your product reaching the potential customer? Competitor analysis shows competitors’ marketing strategies (including their advertisements, social media marketing, and geographical areas they are targeting).
- Competitor product tracking: Which of the competitors’ products are gaining the most popularity. You can either bring the same product or an entirely new product which is better than what they are selling.
- Competitor pricing: Grofers is an online grocery store. Several brands put their products on the site. However, Grofers also put their line of products which is similar to other brands with lower prices. And this is what the customers want, a good product at a lower price.
- Customer acquisition: If you know your competitors’ weaknesses and strengths, you can easily plan your marketing strategy to acquire customers. Competitor analysis helps you to achieve your sales goals.
Tools for Competitor Analysis
The top five competitor analysis tools that will help you gain more knowledge about your competitors are:
1. SpyFu
This software provides SEO research, PPC research, keyword research, and other features. SpyFu competitor analysis tool offers unlimited searches, projects, and exports. Additionally, the SEO research provides SEO competitor analysis, SEO keyword research, competitor backlinks, domain comparison, and rank tracker. Then the PPC research provides Google Ads competitors, PPC keyword research, PPC keyword suggestion, Google Ads Templates, and Ad history. SpyFu provides three pricing plans, basic, professional, and team. The basic monthly plan is $39/mo, and the annual plan is $33/mo. Next, the professional monthly plan is $79/mo, and the yearly plan is $58/mo. The monthly team plan is $299/mo, and the annual plan is $199/mo. A 30-day free version is available with a membership of $33/mo.
2. Similarweb
This software provides an all-in-one comprehensive competitive marketing intelligence solution. Similarweb offers to benchmark your traffic and engagement across several marketing channels. It helps develop a customized solution for your company’s needs and brings more opportunities to your table. Business giants like Booking.com, Adidas, Walmart, and the Economist use Similarweb for gaining massive online traffic. Other services it provides are Referral research, keyword research, ad creative research, and media buying. The software has a free and an enterprise version. And a demo version is also available. However, the vendor did not provide the pricing details. Contact them for more information on customization features.
3. Woorank
The third popular tool on the list is Woorank. It provides a competitor analysis solution for companies to monitor the SEO, keywords, ad campaigns, and competitors’ other marketing techniques. Woorank lets you manage multiple competitors within the report. In addition, it offers to find new SEO competitors using work’s real-time Google search results. A free trial is available. And the software provides pro, premium, and enterprise versions. The pro version costs around $79.99/mo, the premium version costs $199.99/mo, and the pricing information is not available for the enterprise version. Contact the vendor for the details.
4. Semrush
It provides a competitive research toolkit. Semrush software helps discover competitors’ website’s traffic sources, audience and lead gen sources, and marketing trends and analyses the regional source to build a robust marketing strategy. The features include traffic analytics, SEO, advertising, content and PR, and social media. Traffic analytics helps to find the points where your competitors devote most of their marketing efforts. In addition, it helps to find leads and prospects for your firm. Semrush provides three pricing plans: Pro which costs $119.95/mo, the guru plan which costs $229.95/mo, and the business plan $449.95/mo. Pro and Guru have free versions available. In addition, you can get a subscription to the business plan. Contact the vendor for a customized plan.
5. Owletter
This competitor analysis tool provides industry-specific solutions for retails, agencies, and marketers, and monitors all the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses on one platform. For example, you can see if competitors have a reputation for sending spam emails or not? You can utilize it to get an edge over them. Owletter offers a competitor email analytics for the same. It helps to discover patterns and trends. A free trial for 14-days is available with all the plans. You can pay monthly or annually. The starter pricing plan costs around $19/mo, $39/mo for the pro plan, and $79/mo for the unlimited plan (you can monitor unlimited websites).
Use Cases of Competitor Analysis
The use cases of competitor (competitive) analysis are as follows.
Airlines
The airline industry is the most suitable example of how competitor analysis should be utilized. Airline companies constantly alter their ticket rates according to the external information they gather. For instance, if all competitors raise their prices for a specific route, an airline company would immediately follow suit to adjust higher margins. Additionally, consumers’ information is rapidly utilized for pricing adjustments. By tracking and identifying particular customers, airline companies can easily spot when a potential consumer frequently looks for the exact flight details. Thus, raise the prices over time since companies can be sure that specific customers want to fly on these chosen dates.
IT start-ups
Startups are also one of the finest competitor analysis examples, as they use this kind of information to obstruct the markets. Old companies often have big budgets, and resources, but they sometimes lack strategies to monitor their competitors. In such cases, startups are often able to outshine traditional companies in particular niche areas with the help of competitor analysis tools. The reason is that Startups focus on specific areas, quickly adapt, and react to customer behavior and competitors’ marketing strategies from the competitor analysis. And thus, promptly figure out clients’ pain points better than established companies and deliver better and fast solutions—for instance, Airbnb and how they leveraged technology and monitored the competitors to obstruct the hotel industry.
Sports
Another most competitive market in the world is the sports industry. Sports companies have the skill to interpret and process external data to their advantage rapidly. Their strategies have shown excellent results around the world. Sports companies outshine their budgets because they excel in getting new data from customers and competitors, gaining insights by using various analytics tools (competitor analytics tools), and effectively distributing the processed information among their management teams.
Summary: Use Competitor Analysis for Business Growth
Competitor analysis helps you to monitor your competitor’s moves closely. It keeps you on the right track and enables you to take corrective action for your business. With the help of Google Analytics and other tools, you can find out how much traffic your competitors are getting on their websites, which are their most saleable products, and where they lag. From which geographical area the competitors are receiving the most and the least amount of traffic are the questions that you can ask from competitor analysis.
