6 resources that will tell you how your online marketing competitors are doing

As a serious online marketing entrepreneur you would definitely want to know how your competition is measuring up against your own success.  If they’re doing better than you, wouldn’t you want to know how they’re doing this and how you can tap into some of that success?  Well, you can and it’s not as difficult as some people would have you believe.

This can simply be done by going to Google and typing in the relevant keywords to see who your competition is based on their paid advertising.

How it’s done in the offline world

This is similar in the offline world where businesses monitor their competition over a specific period of time.  They monitor their ads and the ones that continue to run are those making most money whereas those with the shorter lifespan tend to be those that haven’t worked out.  One way they may do this is by looking in magazines and taking notes on the full-page ads then checking back issues through the local library.

Online competitive analysis – Basic sources of research

The focus for this is those businesses using paid advertising within Google.  Technology is available on the internet that does this analysing for you and is called KeywordSpy.com.  What you are looking for are advertisers in Google that are paying for the top spots in competitive markets and that keep the same ad up there week after week.  KeywordSpy.com will provide you with all of this data.  It is amazing what you can find out about your online competition this way and you will probably find that you know more about their advertising campaigns than they do.

Using this method, you can also see exactly how much they are paying per click on every keyword they are bidding on in the paid advertising section of Google.

Competitive analysis can also be carried out using a resource called CBEngine.com.  This is mainly used by affiliate marketers to find undiscovered clickbank marketplace products before everyone else starts promoting them.  It can give you access to profitable hidden information and help maximise your affiliate marketing efforts.

A final one I came across during my research was TeraPeak.com and this will do everything the ones above do and more, but is focussed on the EBay marketplace.

3 main analysis sites that all serious marketers should be using

One of the key findings of your research has to be the amount of traffic that your competitors’ websites are getting.  You may already be familiar with a FREE resource that gives you these answers and more and that is Alexa.com.  All you need do is enter the website in the search engine and you will be given the estimated volume of traffic going to that site.  Once you find your competitors’ websites on Alexa, simply keep tabs on them each week to see if their traffic is increasing or decreasing.  This tool also allows you to see which websites are linking to your competitors’ sites.

Another incredible tool is found at Compete.com.  This is similar to Alexa but uses various other metrics in gathering date and the results are more accurate than those at Alexa.  With Compete you can find many things such as keyword, website ranking.   There is more advanced data available through this site that will cost you a couple of hundred dollars, but if you are trying to model after your top competitor, it’s perhaps a small price to pay.

Summary

As you have read, there are many places online that you can go to gather data about your competitors.  I would also advise paying close attention to the number of keywords that an advertiser is bidding on in Google and you will find this at KeywordSpy.com as outlined above.  The reason for this is because the more keywords and advertisers bidding, the more traffic they are receiving, a sign of their growing success that you want to be a part of.

When analysing traffic on your competitors you always want to uncover which competitors are the power players and which ones are not doing so great.   Armed with this data, you can begin to plan your traffic strategies.