In today’s cutthroat market, staying ahead means knowing your competition inside and out. Without competitive monitoring, you’re flying blind while rivals seize opportunities. A robust competitor monitoring tool isn’t just an advantage—it’s the secret weapon that separates the leaders from the rest. And with challenger brands flooding the field, there’s no better time to arm yourself with the competitive intelligence that drives smarter decisions, faster actions, and standout success.
The importance of competitor monitoring can’t be overstated:
Competitor monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing your rivals’ strategies, campaigns, and market presence to gain actionable insights. By understanding how competitors perform, engage their audience, and respond to trends, you can identify opportunities, mitigate threats, and refine your own approach to stay ahead. It’s not just about keeping tabs—it’s about leveraging data to outpace the competition and secure your position as a market leader.
Rest assured, your competition is likely already leveraging competitive monitoring—or at least you should assume they are. Don’t let them have exclusive access to insights that could change the game. Beyond measuring your share of voice against other brands, competitive monitoring reveals the performance of rival campaigns, their marketing tactics, and how consumers are responding.
This means you can pinpoint what’s working for them, what isn’t, and adapt these lessons to sharpen your own strategy. But keep in mind—they can do the same to you, and chances are, they already are. Competitive monitoring is a proven way to boost revenue, expand market share, and enhance consumer perception. The brands that master it lead the pack. Let’s ensure you’re the one standing in the winner’s circle!
Quid delivers next-generation competitor monitoring, powered by advanced AI and machine learning, putting you ahead in the race for consumer attention. With 40% of marketing and sales teams recognizing AI-driven data science as critical to success, Quid ensures you have the insights needed to engage, delight, and drive lifetime customer value.
Quid’s tools let you compare conversation volume, track emerging trends, and analyze popular platforms with precision. Our sentiment analysis goes beyond surface-level insights, revealing not just how consumers feel about your competitors but the intensity and underlying reasons behind those sentiments. Transparent and actionable, Quid empowers you to dive deep into the data and uncover the "why" behind consumer behavior—helping you craft smarter strategies and stay ahead of the curve.
Quid’s real-time insights give you the power to identify and address unmet consumer needs that your competition has overlooked. By uncovering the precise reasons behind consumer emotions, you can take swift, targeted action to capture opportunities and deliver impactful results.
Plus, Quid integrates seamlessly with your existing business tools, such as Hootsuite, enabling advanced publishing capabilities. This integration enhances customer care responsiveness, ensuring your brand stays connected, proactive, and ready to exceed expectations.
Google Keyword Planner is a robust, free tool that enhances your keyword strategy by offering detailed insights into keyword performance. It estimates monthly search volumes, assesses competition levels, and suggests related keywords, enabling you to identify trending terms and evaluate their competitiveness. This functionality supports competitor analysis by highlighting which keywords are gaining traction in your industry. Additionally, Keyword Planner organizes your keywords into categories pertinent to your brand, streamlining your campaign planning. Recent updates have improved features such as downloading trend data for individual keywords and using up to 10 seed terms simultaneously, enhancing the tool's usability and effectiveness.
If you are at all familiar with Twitter, then you know its algorithm is totally different from any other social media platform out there. And competitive marketing can be a real hardship if you don’t have the right competitor monitoring tool. Followerwonk allows you to compare yourself against your competition by conducting a simple search to see how your social graph compares to others. This can help you locate overlaps and even target new influencers to up your competitive game.
It’s free with a Twitter account, but if you want to add a little more analyzing muscle, such as optimal posting times and follower losses and gains, there are two paid options starting at $29 per month.
Designed for smaller businesses of 200 or less people, Buzzsumo has a competitor monitoring edge to offer, as it’s all about content. You can discover and compare highly shared content between your brand and a competitors going back about five years. And you can see how these pieces are trending in different key categories.
One of the highlights is this tool’s ability to compare keyword performance alongside your competitors, allowing you to see who is winning the highest engagement across multiple channels. Pricing for this tool starts at $99.00.
Want to understand email marketing activities of your competitors? This is the place for that sort of competitor monitoring! How does it do this? By evaluating insights from email messages your competition sends you. Owletter is able to determine their spam reputation, their specific schedule, frequency changes, trends over time and the topics emails contain. The trick is getting them to send you the email, right? A wrinkle you can iron out, surely. And this option is definitely something to give a hoot about, with pricing that’s fair as well, starting at $19.00 per month. You can get two months free by paying annually.
Spying, or as we like to say monitoring, competitors’ digital marketing campaigns is made simple with this tool. It’s like following a trail of receipts, detailing what they purchased, such as keywords, to more detailed intel on their keyword strategy.
SpyFu offers SEO reports as well that help you stay ahead of trends. Depending on what you need it for, the price plans start at $33/monthly and go up to $299.
This is another competitor monitoring tool that tracks your competitors’ movements. This tool by Amazon, specializes in reporting competitor activities such as the number of pages linked to their websites, average page loading times and search data with keyword insights. It also has the ability to segment traffic into four channels: organic searches, social media, links and direct traffic, enabling you to see which segments are more profitable.
Depending on what you want it for this tool starts at $19.99 per month and increases to $299/monthly. They do offer a free trial.
This one is pretty basic, but it’s also free and is a great way to do a quick check-up on how a competitor’s site is preforming. Simply paste your competition’s website into their search bar and viola! Their site performance is viewable, offering some neat competitor monitoring intel.
They also offer a nifty Ranking Keywords feature which displays popular competitor keywords and their monthly volume. Accompanying this is a score which shows how easy or hard it may be to outrank your competition.
This clever tool aimed at social media, is a great addition to your competitor monitoring capabilities, as it allows you to pre-schedule posts and lightly monitor them. This tool gives you basic knowledge on all your competitors’ social media activities as well. And when paired and integrated with Quid’s abilities, allows you to take a deeper dive into the specifics, such as looking at individual posts and attached sentiments. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial and plans begin at $49 per month.
This is like a cheat sheet for those who need some competitor monitoring but don’t want to stare at facts and figures all day. You decide which competitors you’re interested in and Owler curates company data for you. It will also notify you when there’s breaking news or intel on funding or even acquisitions. For simplified competitive intelligence – this could be a great option. Its basic plan is free and it offers tiered pricing after that.
Do you know how your competitors’ ad measures up? WhatRunsWhere is an advertising tool that measures the performance of your competitors’ ad efforts. It then pinpoints where they are winning, and where they are losing, informing you along the way. If they are winning, perhaps you want to follow in their steps, if they are failing, well you have a chance to stand out from them by adjusting your marketing accordingly. Additionally, you can research trending topics your competition may be discussing, which gives you a chance to hop on that train before the fad fades out. It’s price hovers in the $299 per month range, but there are other tiers to consider past this.
So, this one is a little unique in the competitor monitoring space. It has one goal and that is finding the weak areas of your competitors by focusing its efforts towards the technical side of your competitors’ performance.
Technicalities influence a website’s ranking, so things like broken links, both internal and external can be a real pain. By locating these, contacting the Webmaster and linking to the broken link, you can begin link building, which in turn puts you higher on the stack of search rankings.
Secondly, this site can work like a mini-health checkup for your website too. Siteliner analyzes your site to be sure its links are up to par, which is key because linking influences browser rankings. Without links to your content, your Google ranking is likely to drop. The free version of Siteliner allows analyzing up to 250 pages within one domain.
This is a powerful data mining tool that analyzes web traffic, tracks backlinks, and collects content. And it offers extensive features for SEO. And when it comes to competitor monitoring, Ontolo searches the web for competitor data and stores it in a database. With this database, you can learn more about your competition and see who is following and engaging with them as well as spy on the type of content your competitors are posting online. It’s easy to use, as you simply give it keywords and your competitions’ URLs. It does the rest. This product begins at $97 per month.
This is kind of like the Angie’s List of analytics and is another neat competitor monitoring tool. You can search for IT Techs or Cloud Consultants, for example, or list yourself as one. By listing your company, you gain access to some of their insights, one of which is a SEO report card. By entering a few details about your company, a breakdown of your SEO performance against your competitors is revealed. And it’s free, which is nice when you pay so much for everything else in business.
Google is everywhere, and that’s certainly true within the competitor monitoring game. And MozBar is an extension of their search engine. Its main focus is measuring the domain authority (DA) of a website, or it’s scoring system.
It uses a score to measure a site’s potential strength. The score between 1 and 100 looks at many factors, such as the number of backlinks and content quality. The higher the score, the stronger the SEO performance. This little gem is free though they have plans starting at $99 per month. There are four pricing tiers to consider, each offering something a little more. They also offer a 30-day free trial.
The global competitor monitoring tool market was $37.6 million in 2019 and it is expected to grow to $82 million by 2027. If you aren’t already using competitive intelligence as a part of your social analytics, you need to be. Much like having a website was novel so long ago, this is the next evolution – making your online activities trackable and actionable. And soon, there will be few businesses not using it. That’s a number you do not want to count yourself among.
Any of these tools would make great additions to whatever you’re doing now. But if you want one tool that can do pretty much everything mentioned above without having to switch between tools or websites, reach out for a demo and discover the Quid difference! We’d love to show you around.