That\u2019s where Similarweb can help with our top-notch competitive analysis tools<\/a>. But more on that later.<\/p>\n Competitive monitoring is the process of identifying, evaluating, and monitoring the landscape of your competitors. This process looks at things like the competition’s sales prospecting<\/a>, offerings, pricing, marketing tactics<\/a>, and product launches and developments.<\/p>\n The key benefits of analyzing the competition:<\/p>\n Think of competitive monitoring as a window into your industry, allowing you to see exactly what\u2019s going on around you. Having this birds-eye-view is critical if you want to grow your business and become a leader in your niche.<\/p>\n There are two key types of competitors<\/a> that you should regularly be tracking: direct competitors and indirect competitors<\/a>. Here\u2019s how to identify both:<\/p>\n Direct competitors are businesses that have the same or similar offerings as your own business. These competitors should be your highest priority, as they pose the most immediate threat to your business.<\/strong><\/p>\n If there\u2019s one thing consumers have, it\u2019s options \u2013 and lots of them. So, you can pretty much guarantee that potential customers will compare your offering to the offering of many, many others.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take Wendy\u2019s<\/a> for example. Their direct competitors would be other fast-food chains like McDonald\u2019s<\/a>, Burger King<\/a>, Arby\u2019s<\/a>, Chick-fil-A<\/a>.\u00a0In such a fierce competitive arena, you can bet Wendy\u2019s has entire teams dedicated to diligently monitoring and tracking their direct competitors to stay ahead of the competition \u2013 Frosty, anyone?<\/p>\n The bottom line: in the face of so much competition, it helps to identify where your competitors fall short, so you can better satisfy the needs of potential customers and win their business.<\/p>\n Indirect competitors are those that offer a different type of product or service than your business, but still serve the same consumer base. They\u2019re not as immediately threatening to your business as direct competitors, but it’s important to keep an eye on them.<\/p>\n Why? Because the insight you glean from tracking indirect competitors highlights new perspectives, approaches and ideas that your business may have missed.<\/p>\n It widens your scope of focus and broadens your view of the industry you\u2019re in. As a result, it can spark new strategies to grow and adapt to the needs of your target audience<\/a>.<\/p>\n For example, let\u2019s say you run an at-home workout subscription. Your indirect competitors would be in-person gyms like Planet Fitness<\/a> and Gold\u2019s Gym. You both solve the same customer problem, but in different ways.<\/p>\n In short, competitive monitoring can benefit almost every part of your business:<\/p>\n In order to properly monitor your competitors, you\u2019re going to need the best competitor tracking tools out there. That’s where Similarweb comes in<\/p>\n Our suite of competitive intelligence tools truly makes tracking your competitors a breeze – while giving you the confidence that no stone will be left unturned.<\/p>\n The star of the show: Similarweb’s Competitive Tracker<\/p>\n It does exactly what it says on the tin. You can track up to 25 competitors to get a birds-eye-view of key trends, metrics, and shifts over time in your specific competitive landscape.<\/p>\n The Competitive Tracker not only contextualizes your performance relative to your competitors but also identifies their strengths and weaknesses. With just a few clicks, you can zoom into their data at a granular level, saving your team hours of manual research.<\/p>\n Our Competitive Tracker\u2019s best bits:<\/p>\n Audience overlap:<\/strong> understand how your audience intersects with that of your competitors<\/p>\n Channel-specific insights:<\/strong> see traffic changes by channel and get a detailed breakdown of marketing performance across each one<\/p>\n User engagement metrics:<\/strong> track how well your competitors are engaging and interacting with customers<\/p>\n Keyword and topic trends:<\/strong> Monitor the keywords, trends, and topics your competitors are focusing on, to carry out next-level competitive keyword research<\/a><\/p>\n Here you see that CNN\u2019s close competitor, the NY Times, increased their traffic for over 25 topics in the last month, and there are nearly 15 new ones on the horizon. With these super fresh insights you can dive into the topics and keywords driving traffic for your competitors and strategize ways to redirect it to your own website.<\/em><\/p>\n Paid ad analysis:<\/strong> see how many paid ads your competitors have launched, what they\u2019ve been bidding on and get a peek into their ad creatives<\/p>\n The Competitive Tracker will become your go-to resource for quick, actionable insights.<\/p>\n Another weapon to have in your competitive monitoring arsenal: Similarweb\u2019s Custom Market Analysis tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n While a broad overview of your competitors\u2019 performance has its advantages, what you\u2019re really after is super relevant and targeted analysis<\/strong>.<\/p>\n With the Custom Market Analysis tool, you can get the competitive edge by delving right into website segments and custom industries and scrutinizing categories, lines of business and even specific types of web pages.<\/p>\n Our Custom Market Analysis tool\u2019s best bits:<\/p>\n Website Segments: <\/strong>Focus on specific pages or sections within a website for more targeted analysis<\/p>\n Custom Industries:<\/strong> Create tailored industries to benchmark against, capturing insights specific to your market niche<\/p>\n Key Digital Metrics: <\/strong>Uncover detailed metrics like user engagement, traffic sources, and conversion rates for each segment or custom industry.<\/p>\n By digging into more specialized areas you\u2019ll not only add another layer of precision but you\u2019ll be able to spot opportunities that your competitors have missed. Outsmart them by understanding and acting on market subtleties they\u2019ve overlooked. It\u2019s important to track a variety of metrics to get a truly holistic view of your competitor\u2019s websites. Your goal is to understand their full performance across channels. Here are a few different metrics we suggest tracking:<\/p>\n Understanding your competitors\u2019 traffic sources<\/a> can uncover a lot of interesting insights. With Similarweb, you can check competitors\u2019 website traffic<\/a> and reveal exactly how much traffic your competitors are getting over time from:<\/p>\n Seeing which inbound traffic sources are strongest (and weakest) is highly valuable for marketing and sales strategies<\/a> in terms of traffic quantity and quality. You\u2019ll be able to see which tactics are working well for your rivals, and which aren\u2019t, as well as analyze traffic gaps<\/a> and refine your strategy.<\/p>\n This will help you and your team revise your marketing tactics to both take inspiration from the competition, as well as fill in the gaps that others in your niche have neglected.<\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t it be great to know which keywords your rivals are ranking for? Are there any you\u2019ve missed and need to optimize for on your website? Is one particular brand killing it with seasonal keyword trends? If you want to carry out the best competitive SEO analysis<\/a> possible, you\u2019ll need access to the most targeted keyword data out there.<\/p>\n Keyword data is a treasure trove of information that will help your business improve its SEO strategies \u2014 from keyword gaps<\/a> to seasonal keywords.<\/p>\n Competitive SEO analysis, including competitive keyword research and competitive content analysis<\/a>, should be performed regularly to discover new keyword opportunities and blog topic ideas<\/a>.<\/p>\n Keep a close eye on the rankings of your pages vs. your competitor pages. Use Similarweb’s Rank Tracker<\/a> to stay on top of all relevant ranking data per keyword and URL.<\/p>\n You can:<\/p>\n To improve your own ad campaign strategies, start by taking a look into what is (and isn’t) working for your competitors.<\/p>\n Similarweb Display Overview reveals insights on the top publishers<\/a>, top ad networks, and key insights on traffic and engagement. You can also easily identify the publishers and ad networks your competitors are working with to acquire more traffic, as well as exactly which ads are performing best for your rivals. This can give your creatives juicy ideas on how to best optimize your own ad campaigns.<\/p>\n Paid search campaigns need fresh data to stay ahead of the competition.<\/p>\n Similarweb\u00a0gives a unique view of when and how other brands are driving paid traffic, as well as reveals what paid channels they use. Analyze your PPC competitors<\/a> and get a holistic view of their PPC strategy<\/a> through metrics such as:<\/p>\n Examine the percentage of traffic sent from your competitors\u2019 various social pages, amount of social visits, and changes in their social traffic<\/a> over time.<\/p>\n For example, you discover your competitors aren’t posting on Instagram, so you decide to capitalize on their shortcomings and build up a booming presence there. Going boldly where no one else has gone before, while perhaps a bit risky, can also reap big rewards.<\/p>\n Monitoring referral traffic<\/a>, incoming and outgoing, can reveal new potential affiliate marketing opportunities<\/a> and affiliate networks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Referrals include traffic from:<\/p>\n For example, you discover that your biggest competitor brings in tons of customers through one specific referral \u2013 if you manage to win a partnership for your own organization, it could hugely improve your bottom line.<\/p>\n A smart competitive strategy could be sitting right in your inbox.<\/p>\n Try signing up for your biggest competitors\u2019 newsletters and email campaigns. See what email marketing tactics they use, what offerings they do and don\u2019t promote, what kinds of sales they have, etc.<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of the most effortless ways to monitor your competitors, as it lands straight to your inbox each day.<\/p>\n Stay up-to-date on when competitors add a new technology to their stack or make an acquisition. This indicates new capabilities and directions your competitors are heading in. This information is useful for refining and adjusting your own strategies.<\/p>\n Do some research into who sits on the board of your top competitors, as well as who invests in them. Understanding what their backgrounds are as well as what past strategies they\u2019ve used for success can provide some potential insights into what your competitor\u2019s future plans may look like.<\/p>\n Go to Google Alerts<\/a> and sign up to be alerted each time your competitors\u2019 names are mentioned in the news. This way, you\u2019ll always be caught up on all their latest updates \u2013 from new product announcements and market positioning<\/a> to new rounds of funding and social media splashes.<\/p>\nWhat is competitive monitoring?<\/h2>\n
![\"Competitive](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/competitor-monitoring-definition.png\")
<\/p>\n\n
Which competitors should you be monitoring?<\/h2>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/image5.png\")
<\/p>\nDirect competitors<\/h3>\n
Indirect competitors<\/h3>\n
Who in your organization should be tracking competitors?<\/h2>\n
\n
How can you monitor your competitors with Similarweb?<\/h2>\n
![\"Competitive](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/CNN-competitive-tracker-overview.png\"){kind=tracking}
<\/p>\n![\"audience](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/CNN-audience-overlap.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"trending](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/CNN-competitive-trends.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"paid](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/CNN-paid-ads.png\")
<\/p>\n
\n What are the most critical competitor data points to track?<\/h2>\n
Website traffic<\/h3>\n
\n
![\"marketing](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Channel-overview-competitive-monitoring.png\")
<\/p>\nTargeted keywords<\/h3>\n
![\"Keyword](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Keyword-Seasonality-1.png\")
<\/p>\nRank tracking<\/h3>\n
\n
Display ads<\/h3>\n
![\"ad](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Display-Ads.png\")
<\/p>\nPaid search<\/h3>\n
\n
![\"Paid](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Paid-Search-Overview-1.png\")
<\/p>\nSocial activity<\/h3>\n
Referrals<\/h3>\n
\n
Email marketing<\/h3>\n
Recent acquisitions and investment in new technology<\/h3>\n
![\"Example](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Track-competitors-wordle.png\")
<\/p>\nBoard members and investors<\/h3>\n
News mentions<\/h3>\n
Time to get trackin\u2019!<\/h2>\n