15 Best Tools to Spy on Your Competitors Marketing Strategies & Data

What software tools do you use to do competitive analysis and monitor your own progress? In this article, we share with you our recommendations for the best SaaS Marketing & Competitor Analysis tools in 2022 and 2023. With the help of these amazing software, you can spy online on your competitors' marketing strategies, ad campaigns, audience base, business partners, traffic, backlinks, keywords, performance, and keep updated with their every move. By monitoring and analyzing your competitors, you can learn about what's in demand in the market, what are the channels to reach more audiences, and what are the working strategies to convert them into your customers. And then, you can plan and execute your own strategies and stay ahead of your competition.

List of Top Software Tools to do Competitor Monitoring and Analysis

1. Google Alerts – to monitor keyword mentions across the web

Using Google Alerts, you can get email alerts or RSS feed with the latest mentions of any keywords across the web. You can choose the frequency of email alerts to immediate, daily or weekly. The sources to scan for your keywords can be set to be Automatic, or choosen from these categories: Web, News, Blogs, Videos, Books, Discussion and Finance. You can filter only the best results, or get all results. Language and Region preferences can also be specified. In this way, you can create multiple Google Alerts for different target keywords, and get to know the latest info on it whenever it is published to the Web. You will discover competing publishers and content with this tool.

2. SparkToro - to research competitors’ audiences

SparkToro has crawled and indexed the public profiles of people across 12 social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc. All this aggregated public data is a treasure trove of valuable insights about your and your competition's audience. You can learn about the audiences' Demographics like job titles, education, gender, age groups, location, employers, etc. Their favorite brands, accounts and topics they browse, visit, and talk about. What hashtags they use, who they follow, podcasts they listen to, Youtube channels they watch, etc. With SparkToro, you can conveniently navigate this vast data landscape by searching, sorting, and filtering, and make lists of your target audience and their interests & preferences.

3. iSpionage - to understand your competitors' conversion strategy

With iSpioange, you can learn from the performance of your competitors' A/B tests for PPC (pay-per-click) ads and landing pages. So, your competitors will be spending money on their PPC campaigns while you get valuable insights from them for free. You can monitor the competitors' funnels from acquisition to conversion, and get actionable ideas for implementing in your own campaigns. Any changes they make to their PPC campaigns, landing pages or SEM (search engine marketing) strategy are sent to you via email alerts. iSpionage gives you access to over 7 years of data on PPC and SEO keywords from Google, Bing and Yahoo. With it, you can discover your competitors' profitable keywords, ad copy and landing pages, and improve your CTR (click through rate) and reduce your ads budget by lowering your CPC (cost per click).

4. SpyFu - to spy on Google ads keywords, ad variations

SpyFu gives you data on your most successful competitors for the last 16 years. This includes their keywords for Google ads, their organic ranks and ad variations. With such data, you get to learn the secret search engine marketing formulas that have worked for your competition. You can then design your own marketing strategies and ad campaigns, and track & compare their performance with the historical as well as current data. Avoid wasting money on Google ads by getting negative-match recommendations about keywords to skip from SpyFu. It will also recommend the most profitable predicted keywords by scanning your entire website and ads campaign history. Spyfy also shows you gaps in the ad keywords that are working for your competitors but you are leaving on the table.

5. Mention - to monitor online mentions about your competitors

With Mention, you can monitor the online mentions of any brands and business across 1 billion sources, be it your competitors or your own. It gives you a convenient dashboard and regular email alerts, including Spike emails for peak times when there is an avalanche of mentions. This ensures that you are on top of live audience reactions, enabling you to notice and respond to opportunities and threats, like during feature announcements, product updates, or service outages. The stream of feed is being constantly updated on Mention, and you can organize and prioritize the different items. Advanced research, Daily recaps and Smart folders helps you filter through extensive data sources and avoid missing important conversations.

6. Visualping - to detect and monitor competitors’ website changes

Visualping alerts you whenever there is any change on a website or webpage of interest to you. It provides you with screenshots highlighting what has changed. You can also dig deeper into the changes and updates using Visualping's dashboards. You can stay updated with every edit that is published on their websites. In this way, you remain informed about what your competitor brands and businesses are upto. You can determine the frequency of website change alerts from as quick as every 5 mins to 1 month. Similarly, you can choose the threshold of the website change trigger that gets reported to you: from Every single change, to Tiny (1%) to Gigantic (50%). Using machine learning, Visualping learns from your feedbacks about what's important and what's not, helping you focus on the important tasks while cutting the noise.

7. Semrush - to reveal your competitors' promotion strategies

Semrush is one platform to measure various aspects of online marketing. These include SEO, competitor research, PPC, content marketing and social media marketing. You can study the website traffic and promotion strategies of your competitors. You will get reports of keyword and backlink gaps for your own website. With Organic Research, you will discover who your organic search competitors are, and the keywords that they are overlooking. You can do Advertising Research with Semrush and receive detailed analysis of your competitors' ads in minutes. And using Social Media Tracker, you can track your competitors' social media. Thus, by understanding your audience's preferences, you can figure out social media content strategies to increase engagement.

8. BuiltWith - to find out the technology stack of any website

BuiltWith has a database of over 61k web technologies that can be used to build websites. It has analyzed the source code of more than 673 Million websites. This makes BuiltWith a valuable platform to learn about the trends in web development. You can pinpoint any particular website and BuiltWith will show you the technology stack that is being used to build it. Or you can analyze the broader market and see how many sites use popular elements like shopping carts, chatbots, newsletters etc. Which programming languages, frameworks and libraries are being used in a given region or industry? What is the tech stack of your most successful competitors? What is the market share of different web technologies? Who are the leading hosting providers? In short, BuiltWith can simplify the answering of any question regarding the web technologies behind any site. You can also use chrome extension like wappalyzer

9. WooRank - to analyze websites and reveal their weaknesses

WooRank is a website optimization platform, which will tell you the website scores, weaknesses, and improvement scope for any website. You can use it to compare how your website is performing relative to your top competitors. WooRank presents you with a detailed, actionable report with dozens of data points. You get advice on how you can fix the website issues that were found in its analysis. Besides website optimization, WooRank also lets you monitor your competitors' SEO strategy and discover SEO issues that can impact your online visibility.

10. SpyOnWeb - to search for websites belonging to the same owner

SpyOnWeb is a website metadata research tool. It uses a specialized web crawler that looks at website owners' and hosting providers identifying information. It includes the IP addresses, Google adsense ID, Google analytics ID etc. By indexing and revealing this background information of any website, you can find out other websites that have the same owners or admins. In this way, you can figure out info about your competitors' other websites and domains.

11. Owletter – to reveal competitors' email marketing strategy

Owletter captures all the emails that a website's newsletter publishes. It collects and stores plenty of data about the email marketing campaigns of millions of websites. You can get timely alerts about your competitor's ongoing email campaigns. Owletter will also show you the historical data for the email marketing content and trends for any website. Hence, you can get content & design ideas inspiration for your own email marketing campaigns. You can see the keywords that a given website's email newsletters was using, their spam rating, frequency of posting, popular days for posting etc. Thanks to Owletter, you don't need to use your own email address to be subscribed to thousands of email newsletters. Thus, your inbox remains clean and tidy, while you have all the info about your competitors' email marketing campaigns at your fingertips!

12. Monitor Backlinks – to spy on competitor backlinks

Monitor Backlinks provides valuable backlinks & keywords data for any website with a simple user interface. This makes it the best monitoring tool for backlinks and keywords. You can see both the good and bad backlinks for yourself and your competitors. With Monitor Backlinks, you can easily manage to disavow the bad and spam backlinks that negatively impact your SEO scores. You can find out what are the high quality sites that your competitors are getting backlinks from. Monitor Backlinks will also give you personalised suggestions for your own link building and outreach campaigns. It also alerts you whenever you lose your valuable backlinks, so that you can respond to such negative changes and try to recapture them.

13. Analisa.io - to analyze any Instagram and Tiktok account

Analisa specializes in social media analytics for Instagram and Tiktok platforms. These social platforms have many individual influencers who can do sponsored posts for different brands and businesses. Also, big brands have their official channels on these social networks where they post content regularly to engage and grow their audience base. With Analisa, you can do follower authenticity audits for any Tiktok or Instagram profile. Many influencers can buy likes or follows, and this results in low-quality views that are not lucrative for businesses. So, you must be able to seek genuine accounts with organic followers and real fans. Analisa helps you perform analysis on competitors' social media campaigns, their audience demographics, posting schedules, content analysis like popular hashtags and keywords, etc.

14. BuzzSumo – to track the virality of any online content on socials

BuzzSumo is a content marketing platform that finds for you online content that performs the best. You can identify influencers to partner with, and monitor the performance of your and your competitors' content. BuzzSumo lets you track the blogs and social channels of different brands, topics, products and competitors. You can create alerts for key influencers, bloggers and journalists, to get industry news and latest publications delivered straight to your inbox. BuzzSumo helps you to discover the secrets about what works and what doesn't by analyzing the content and social media marketing strategies of others. You can learn from your competitors' mistakes and dodge disasters by avoiding such errors in your own strategies.

15. Similarweb - to spy on competitors’ referral traffic sources

Similarweb lets you effortlessly analyze and understand the competitive landscape you are operating in. It has a comprehensive view of the world's digital traffic across the web. You can make confident marketing decisions thanks to Similarweb's reports of the performances of your brand, your competitors, and the wider industry. With Similarweb, you can track significant trends in competitive traffic and their audience engagement across channels. Similarweb provides you with Referral and Affiliates Research tools to reveal your competitors' top referral sources based on traffic share and quality. You can use this information to find potential new partners in your industry and build your own successful and lucrative affiliate partnerships.

Final Words

Without good competitor analysis, the investments and strategies of your competitors become obstacles or roadblocks in your success. But with the help of the competitor analysis tools we recommended, your competitors' moves serve as guiding points for your own roadmap. You can validate what works and what fails by looking at the landing pages, social media accounts, blog content, email newsletters, website tech stack, backlinks, keywords, traffic etc. of your competitors.

Competitor Analysis tools make it easy to analyze and leverage billions of data points to give you actionable advise with a simple interface. This saves plenty of time and efforts for your marketing team. You can filter and query through historical data, as well as receive timely alerts for updates about other brands and businesses. Hence, you must use the best Competitive Analysis tools to spy on your competitors. They provide you valuable insights for designing your own successful and lucrative content strategies and marketing campaigns.