37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

I've always liked the idea of being a spy, complete with gadgets, fast cars, and an attractive significant other. It would be a great way to get secret information.

Well, it may be too late for me to join the Secret Service, but I can indulge in a bit of undercover information gathering – and you can, too – by taking a sneak peek at competitors.

We're not talking industrial espionage, but there are plenty of good reasons to see what competitors are doing. You can:

• Get inspiration for new ways to connect with customers and thereby improve customer retention.
• Find out if competitors are doing anything better than you and how you can match it.
• Look under the hood of their search and marketing optimization strategy and see what you can legally steal.
• Improve your own plans to beat the competition based on data rather than assumptions.

There are dozens of marketing tools that you're probably already using to monitor your own performance. These can be used to get competitive intelligence. Let's assume you already know who the competition is. All you have to do is monitor these different areas.

Here are the first 7 Marketing Tools;

Ad Monitoring Tools

Do you want to know where your competitors are advertising so you can do the same? Would you like to know which keywords they are targeting? If you want to troubleshoot your PPC and display ads, this set of tools will help you:

1. Adbeat is an enterprise tool that lets you see all of the ads that particular advertisers are using, split test their ad copy to help you with strategy, and find competitors you didn't even know about. The introductory package starts at $99 per month, though that monitors only Google ads. There's a 30-day free trial.

2. AdGooroo is a multifunctional tool that includes a Display Insight feature. The basic service lets you monitor ads for up to ten competitors, ranked by page views. Its Industry Insight allows you to figure out ad placements, too. Pricing is not stated.

3. AdGooroo also has an SEM Insight tool that incorporates keyword research, competitive intelligence, PPC and SEO tools, and traffic data. Pricing is not stated.

4. MixRank allows you to see the mix of ads that companies are using. You can see a snapshot of this data (without registering) that covers display ads, text ads, advertisers, and demographics, though you will have to create an account for the full report.

5. Moat provides a free ad search tool that allows you to key in your competitors' brand names and see what ads they have shown recently. You can see the size and some of the places the ads have been seen recently, giving you a good guide for where to place your own advertising.

6. SocialAdNinja has a database of 400,000 social PPC ads. It's a great tool for monitoring global Facebook advertising. It includes fine-grained search features so you can identify ads targeting your key demographic and find out which links they point to. There's a single membership level at $147 per month.

7. WhatRunsWhere helps you monitor competitors to figure out their advertising strategy and where they are placing ads. As a bonus, it can help with advertising research and split testing, finding new sources of traffic, and ad buying.

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