How to Track My Competitors' Growth Online?
Competitor monitoring is a huge beast but with a well-thought-out plan, you can tackle it one piece at a time.
Tracking your competitor’s growth on the internet will do wonders for your overall digital marketing strategy.
Your competitors’ growth helps you to find out if you are missing out on something, find new audiences, capture the best inspiration from their campaigns, and so much more.
Ever-evolving marketing trends, changing consumer behavior, and the constantly shifting competitive landscape make it almost mandatory to track, learn, and implement tactics better than your competitors.
Here’s a simple framework to track your competitors’ online growth:
Things to Consider When Tracking Your Competitor’s Growth
SEO & Social Organic Traffic
Content strategy is a powerful and long-term game that needs constant monitoring.
On search and social, if done right, content pulls in tremendous levels of brand awareness, reach, brand equity, website traffic, leads, and revenue.
Tracking each competitor’s growth from their SEO and organic social media efforts is a critical component of your framework when it comes to tracking your competitors’ growth online.
Need tools to help? Here are some of the best competitor tracking tools you can use to stay ahead of the pack.
Ad Volume & Ad Creatives
You’d know if your competitors are on to something If you see a rise in ad volume and ad spend and an ever-growing list of traffic sources or ad networks that your competitors are running ads on.
Quote: If you were ever stuck with what kind of offers, promotions, and discounts you’d want to give away, take a look at what your competitors are doing.
No one spends on ads without strong intent. Tracking your competitors’ ad volume is only the first step though.
From there, you can also steal their creatives (without breaking the law), make note of their offers and angles, and get endless inspiration from those campaigns.
Email Campaigns & Number of Emails Sent
Not sending email marketing campaigns is a huge mistake -- one that can cost brands dearly. If your competitors are using email campaigns, however, that’s both good news and bad news.
It’s good because you can learn from them quickly, implement your email campaigns, and hit the ground running.
It’s bad news especially if you don’t have your own email campaigns running or if you miss the bus when it comes to great creatives, angles, and campaign types that you could be running instead.
With tools like Panoramata, a world of campaigns is made available to you, on a single dashboard.
List your competitors, dig into their email campaigns, and take note of everything they do with their campaigns:
- email designs
- email content(or copy)
- offers they make
- angles they take
- calls-to-action they use
- subject lines that seem to work well
- the frequency of emails for each brand you track
Discounts & Promotions
Promotions and discounts are the tried & tested ways to ramp up sales for your business or to help generate leads faster.
If you were ever stuck with what kind of offers, promotions, and discounts you’d want to give away, take a look at what your competitors are doing.
These discounts and promotions are more or less for similar sets of audiences.
Ads, email marketing messages, and SMS messages are the fastest path to uncovering an array of offers and discounts.
Backlinks & Keyword Volume
A simple search on tools competitor traffic analysis tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Similarweb will quickly show you the number of backlinks, keywords your competitors rank for, average keyword volumes (and corresponding competitiveness of each keyword), and more.
If you ever stopped to wonder if investing in long-term SEO (which includes backlink profiles and keyword targeting), your competitors’ earned traffic and presence on search listings should quickly quell any doubts you might have had.
Social Media Follower Count
Social media presence (your own and that of your competition) should be an important aspect of your competitor analysis framework.
Growth on organic social media only tells you just how popular, how important, and how engaging your competitors are on social media channels they are present on.
You could look up each of your competitors individually on chosen social channels (including YouTube). Or you could use tools such as Brand24, Semrush’s Social Media Toolkit, and others to quickly extract the information you need.
Look out for aspects such as an organic increase in social followers, types of content posted, engagement rate trends, the voice of your competitors’ brands, and more.
Make a note of each of these aspects you should look out for (along with KPIs and metrics to measure each of the above) and stay organized with the data you gather.
Track not only your competitors’ growth but also monitor and learn from them by using Panoramata -- a single-dashboard view (using exclusive filters) to help you find your competitors’ ads, landing pages, email campaigns, websites, and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is it important to track your competitors’ growth online?
Tracking your competitors’ growth helps you identify industry trends, benchmark your performance, and uncover new opportunities. It also enables you to adjust your strategies based on what’s working in the market.
2. What are the key metrics to monitor for competitor growth?
Focus on metrics like website traffic, social media engagement, ad performance, and customer reviews. These provide insights into their reach, effectiveness, and customer sentiment.
3. What tools can help with competitor tracking?
Platforms like Panoramata, Semrush, and Similarweb offer features to track competitors’ online presence, ad campaigns, and website performance. Choose one that aligns with your needs for real-time data and comprehensive insights.