Selection: 5 unobvious competitive analysis tools that you might not have known about

Competitive analysis is an extremely interesting topic, but most of the articles on this topic have a minimal immersion in the issue. We’ll be told from text to text about how useful tools are, like SimilarWeb, paid access to which costs like Boeing, Alexa, which was last relevant many years ago, or App Annie, which will be almost impossible to learn to use quickly.

I have been professionally engaged in marketing, including in international markets, for many years and have compiled a list of five non-obvious tools for studying how your competitors are progressing.

Infatica

This is not at all obvious, but resident proxy services can be quite successfully used for competitive intelligence. The idea is simple - today companies have learned to deal with attempts to analyze their sites using bots. Most often, such software uses IP from pools belonging to proxy providers. Blocking them is pretty easy.

If you can rent addresses that will not differ from those used by ordinary users, you can establish a connection and study the content you need. In addition, resident proxies allow you to analyze search results and advertising in different countries - you will see it the way users in these countries see it.



I use the Infatica service because they have no restrictions on the volume of traffic pumping or simultaneously established sessions.

Apptica

If you work in a field where so-called in-app advertising is actively used (that is, ads inside mobile applications), then there are not many options available to track the activity of rival companies. One of the functional and inexpensive tools is the Apptica service.

With it, you can get information about what types of ads and advertising formats and networks are used by advertisers.



The service is also useful for mobile application developers, since you can analyze in-app campaigns launched in competing applications. As a result, you can understand what kind of advertising should be implemented in the application.

MOAT

A simple tool that allows you to see what kind of online advertising a particular company uses. It looks like a simple search engine, in which you need to drive the name of the desired company.

As a result, the system will give out a selection of advertising in various formats (“creatives”):



For each of them, the report will provide information about the sites on which this type of advertising was placed, the file type and its size. That is, with the help of MOAT, you can understand not only what kind of advertising competitors launch, but where exactly they do it.

Ivalival

We have already examined the tools for analyzing the advertising activity of competitors in mobile applications, external sites, and RivalIQ helps to conduct a study of social networks.

The service presents an aggregated report on competitors, which includes data from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. At the same time, one can not only obtain data on where and which posts the companies publish, what kind of response they receive, but also make comparisons.



It is clear why this is necessary - relying on data on the activity of competitors in social networks, you can use this channel more effectively.

Ghostery

In general, initially Ghostery is an online privacy tool. For example, using the extension for Chrome, users can find all the various web trackers embedded in a web page and block them (this prevents data collection and speeds up work):



For a marketer, this information is very valuable - you can easily find out what data about your users collect companies.

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That's all for today, thanks for watching! What competitive analysis tools do you use?