37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

Numbers 20 - 25

Monitoring and Mentions

Often recommended for monitoring mentions of your own brand, social media monitoring tools work equally well for seeing what people are saying about your competitors.

20. Google Alerts saves you the trouble of visiting the site to repeatedly perform the same search. Set up an alert and have the latest news about your competitors delivered to your inbox. It monitors news, blogs, video, discussions, and books, and it is free.

21. Mention combines media and social monitoring. It tracks content published on web pages, news sites, blogs, and forums in 42 languages. It provides real time social alerts and has an excellent mobile app. There's a free plan, with the upgrade starting at $6.99 per month.

22. Social Mention provides real time search of brand mentions on blogs, microblogs, images, videos, questions, and bookmarking sites. This free web search tool also provides a broad brush sentiment analysis.

23. Talkwalker offers a service similar to Google Alerts, giving you the choice of monitoring news, blogs, discussions, or everything. You also can monitor content in different languages. It is free.

24. Topsy allows you to search tweets from 2006 forward, looking at links, photos, videos, influencers, and more. The free online search can provide a snapshot of a competitor's Twitter presence, but you will need the pro version for real time results and alerts, reports, and identification of key influencers.

25. You also can use Twitter's own search tool and save your searches, though the basic search doesn't provide the depth that Topsy has.

Source; http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229350

37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

Here are your next six marketing tools 14 to 19

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.

Link Popularity and Backlink Tools

14. Ahrefs provides a wealth of information on external links, referring domains and IPs, top pages, main anchor text, linked domains, and more. There's a limited free account covering 3 reports and 10 results, but for fuller data you'll need to upgrade to the $79 per month package.

15. Majestic Site Explorer provides a detailed link profile for any site. In addition to working with current data, you also can check its historical index to see results over time. There is a limited free version.

16. Open Site Explorer describes itself as a search engine for links. It provides information on page and domain authority, linking domains, anchor text used, and more; you also can compare link profiles for up to five sites. It is free, though signing up for Moz Analytics gives you access to (much) more data.

Web Ranking Tools

How are people interacting with your competitors' sites? The next set of tools provides  website competitive analysis on consumer data to help companies improve their targeting in different segments.

17. Alexa has been tracking global web traffic for a couple of decades and using it to provide website ranking on a global and country basis. The traffic sources and other data can help with benchmarking your site against your competitors.

18. Compete describes itself as a “digital intelligence” tool which uses online consumer behavior.

19. SimilarWeb is a competitive analytics-monitoring tool that provides data on traffic sources, top content, social mentions, and more. There's a lot of data available for free, including referral sites, search traffic, key topics and more. Pro packages start at $99 per month.

Source; http://www.entrepreneur.com