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Competitive intelligence is an important task that Internet marketers should not take lightly. Knowing what your competition is doing is imperative in the offline world; the same is true online.
Online marketers have an advantage over their offline peers: eMarketers can get data about their competitors' marketing activities, and the data can be worth a lot of money if used correctly. For example, with the right tools you can find your competitors' estimated marketing spending, targeting patterns, and means of optimization. Offline, getting such data could require breaking several laws and risking prosecution and jail time!
This data is accessible at various levels of accuracy and detail on the Internet and you don't have to break any laws to get it. There are a number of tools and services available to help you with competitive analysis. The data provided are ALWAYS estimates, and some are more realistic than others; the general rule of thumb is to take any information with a smaller or bigger grain of salt.
Don't use the data as if they are absolute facts and figures. Before you make important decisions based on the data you uncover, use a number of different tools to acquire the data, and still others to compare them; most important, inform yourself about what sources were used by each service to generate the results for you.
A very good article that explains some of the issues when it comes to metrics and measurements on the web is Web Numbers: What's Real? by Sarah Lacy at BusinessWeek Online.
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Syntryx is an enterprise level tool that allows you to analyze in great depth the sources of traffic for your competitor's search, which includes organic search, pay-per-click and also other sources, such as major affiliate publishers who drive considerable business for your competition. One of Syntryx packages, the "Affiliate Recruiter", is especially geared to find and identify top performing affiliates, who you could then try to recruit for your own affiliate program. The "Search Marketers" package is aimed towards PPC marketers and SEOs. It includes the tool "Keyword Dossiers", which allows reverse-engineering the way thriving internet companies actually use keywords and not just how they pay for them. Syntryx is an enterprise level service and only affordable for larger corporations with 5 figures and more marketing budget per year. | |
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Trellian Competitive Intelligence allows you discover your competitors' Internet marketing activities. In terms of price and benefits, this is the best option in my opinion - affordable even for smaller and mid-size businesses. Trellian CI modules:
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Search Intelligence by Hitwise.com is a real-time keyword research and competitive intelligence service. Hitwise provides information on more than 800,000 websites in more than 174 industry categories. The data is derived from partnerships with Internet service providers and represent 10 million U.S. Internet users (25 million worldwide as of December 2006). This is the most comprehensive and by far the most expensive solution available. Pricing for access to the Hitwise data ranges from $50K to $60K annually, and scales down based on narrower deliverables (number of seats requiring access, categories, etc.). |
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AdGooRoo.com SEM Insight provides PPC campaign and competitor monitoring, including organic results monitoring and keyword research. A free trial is available and the fee for the service starts at $89 per month for a limited number of keyword and domains to monitor (AdGooRoo Express). The full service "SEM Insight" starts at $399 per month and "Trademark Insight" starts at $499 per month.
*AdGooRoo offers a 10 Day free-trial for their Express and SEM Insight products. You will not be charged for the service until your trial period is over. You will be enrolled into the service and charged automatically, unless you cancel your trial membership within the provided trial-period. There is no free trial available for Trademark Insight, but you can request a free demo instead. | |
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If you are constantly doing competitive research, the $299 plan is best suited for you - and actually a bargain compared to the prices of similar services. The $19 for one-day access is sufficient if you put together competitive intelligence only a few times a year, as long as you are well prepared to do all the checks in one day. Free tools are not even getting close to this one regarding freshness and accuracy. | |
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KeywordSpy.com is an advanced competitive intelligence and keyword research tool that also allows you to manage your PPC campaigns at the major PPC services, such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. The fee for the service is $89 per month. | |
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SpyFu.com by Velocityscape is the sequel to Googspy.com and is loaded with new features and more than twenty times more data. The free tool shows older data though (two to three months old). For paying customers, Velocityscape also offers competitive intelligence enterprise solutions. Also see my article about SpyFu with the title: In-Depth Competitive Analysis and Keyword Research Tools. | |
 | PPCBully uncovers your competitors' winning combinations of Keywords, Ads, Landing Pages and even Merchants, enabling you to know up front what works (and more important: what does not). | |
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SEOBook Paid Tools for paid members of SEOBook, including an in-depth competitive research tool for all your organic SEO and paid search competitive intelligence needs. The paid membership for $100/month also includes an interactive training program, educational members-only videos, access to the members-only community forums, a free copy of the best selling SEOBook by Aaron Wall and several other goodies. | |
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Compete Search Analytics provides competitive intelligence data for keyword phrases and sites. It also offers the ability to compare two specific websites (the top referral keywords). The data are collected by Compete itself who also provides some free statistics about websites similar to Alexa. The search analytics tool is not free. There is no subscription fee, you pay as you go per report. Each report costs 1-10 credits, one credit costs $0.50. You can get 2-30 bonus credits if you purchase Compete credits in bulk (spending $50 - $500 in one transaction). The individual Compete Search Analytics tools: Keyword Referrals - Site Referrals - Site Comparison | |
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iSpionage.com is the PPC Competitive Intelligence solution that allows you to Research & Drill competing campaigns, setup Alerts to competitive threats, generate campaign related keywords and do Competitive benchmarking. Interesting for affiliate managers: You can also track affiliate ads and identify affiliate networks. They offer a free trial to take it for a test drive. The subscription fees range from $39 to $79 per month. They also have a solution for agencies, but you have to call them for pricing. |
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Hexatrack.com is a tool for online marketers and affiliate marketers that lets you legally spy on your competition, track competitors ad placements and ad copy and help you to improve on already proven ads. Hexatrack is currently in closed beta and free for accepted beta testers. The pricing for the release version is not available at this time. |
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Demographics of your competitors' sites, a tool by Microsoft AdLabs. | |
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SEO Digger is a free CI tool based on the top 20 organic Google results. The number of queries for unregistered users is limited, but registration is free. Registered users can perform 10 domain searches per hour and perform full searches for their domain names. |
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Keyword Difficulty Tool is a special tool to measure the relative difficulty of optimizing for a particular keyword phrase at Google. Provided by SEOmoz.org, but limited to premium members only. | |
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Overture/Yahoo! Bid Tool shows the highest bidders for a specific search term. | |
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NicheBot v2 and WordTrend provide access to Wordtracker, Trellian and Overture data for individual keyword research or competitor analysis and intelligence, as well as graphical reports with 12-month trends for your keywords. Fees depend on usage; the semi-annual subscription provides the best value and is less than $20 per month (which is a bargain). You can test-drive the products for only $1 for 14 days before the selected subscription fee is charged. |
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 | Competitor Dominator by Blue Infinity Software Solutions is desktop competitive intelligence software to determine keywords used by your competitors in organic search results or pay-per-click advertising campaigns on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! or MSN. The software costs about $167 per license. |
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IMTP Competition Finder is only one of five tools of the IM Toolpad package by Softnik Technologies to check your own listings and rankings in major search engines and well as your competitors. The tools were formerly known as Good Keyword Professional and then PPC Bid Reporter Professional. The prime purpose of Competition Finder is to find and assess your competition. The initial versions of this software will make use of search engines to find information. However this will be updated to include multiple other methods. The IM Toolkit also contains the following tools: The IMTP Keyword Pad to Organize and Manage Your Internet Marketing Keyword Lists, the IMTP Website Explorer lets you study websites from a technical perspective, title and meta tags, H1...Hx use etc., the IMTP Website Monitor checks on a regular basis if a specified page loads properly and sends out an alert if something is not okay and last but not least the IMTP Tool Kit is a collection of tools needed to keep things you do with the other tools organized and structured. Pricing: $117 for the single user license with setup on max. 2 different PCs or site license $279 for the installation on multiple PC that belongs to the same company. |
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Google Website Trends shows traffic trends for a specified website. It also shows regions where visitors came from, other websites visited by the same user and keywords used by those users at Google websearch. Additional filters in addition to the domain name are the country/region and date ranges. The tool does not include all sites that are indexed by Google. There is an unknown threshold of traffic that must be reached among other criteria. | |
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Alexa Traffic Ranking statistics make data available for most websites on the Internet. | |
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Popularity Index Rank (PI Index Rank) from Trellian offers a three-month rolling average based on unique sessions logged visiting a specific website. | |
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Site Analytics by Compete.com (formerly known as Snapshot) provides traffic data; rank is based on data collected via Compete Toolbar. You can directly compare traffic data for up to five domains at once. This service is provided by Compete free of charge. | |
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QuantCast.com shows information like estimated number of unique visitors per month, demographics and more. It also allows the direct comparison of five domains at once. This service is also free of charge. | |
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Ranking.com "Top Sites" feature bases its information on Ranking.com data collected via market research software (data explained). | |
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Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic, which was sued and shut down by Amazon.com who owns Alexa.com) will let you compare up to three sites' traffic volume over time, using data from Compete.com and Quantcast.com (Statsaholic is a mash-up of the two services). | |
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URLTrends.com provides ranking and linking trends related to Google, Yahoo!, AllTheWeb, Altavista, Teoma, Furl, Delicious, IceRocket, MSN and Alexa link popularity trends, Google PageRank and Alexa traffic rank trends. |
| Find more Background Information and Statistics to Internet traffic and search engine relationships and market shares. Also related are the Trends & Statistics resources and services, offering usage statistics and survey results for researchers and marketers. |
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Download the free Compete toolbar! (Firefox version also available.) Especially interesting for e-Commerce / B2C Advertisers is another feature. |
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Top Sites by InternetListed will give you a base score (so you can measure your progress) - the score is calculated using your PageRank, Alexa Rank, and average number of backlinks. | |
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NetCraft offers traffic data and hosting information collected via Netcraft Toolbar. | |
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TagURLs.com is a web analytics tool combining the top 500,000 U.S. websites with their topic tags, using data from del.icio.us and Quantcast. You can see the top sites for a specific tag/keyword or see what tags/keywords are associated with a web site. |
| If you are more interested in the traffic and ranking of your own websites (and you should be!), check the Ranking Analysis tools and services. If you have spent enough time checking the bidding activities of your competition at PPC search engines, consider doing some Keyword Research for yourself. |
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NewsKnife.com - shows the top news sites at Google News | |
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Google News Report is similar to NewsKnife, but shows data and developments in condensed format over a period of time. |
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Google Trends lets you see what the world is searching for. | |
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Google Hot Trends shows todays 100 hottest key phrases. Historic data for past days are also available, as well as a RSS feed for the current data. | |
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Google Insights for Search to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. | |
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Yahoo! Buzz provides statistics of most-searched terms on Yahoo! by category. Buzzlog Index shows the top overall searches, leaders and movers. | |
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ASK.com IQ - top weekly searches at the ASK.com search engines, broken down into general searches, advanced searches, news searches and movie searches vs. top movies (box office). | |
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Google Zeitgeist is similar to Ask.com IQ and provides top searches on a weekly and monthly basis. Also an anual Zeitgeist report is available and monthly Zeitgeist(s) from around the world, outside the United States. | |
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Alexa Top 500 shows the top 500 sites worldwide (break-down by country is available) based on their meassured Alexa traffic ranking. |
| For additional trends and statistics resources and services see my Research, Statistics and Knowledge Bases for Marketers resources page here at Cumbrowski.com. |
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Technorati Advanced Search by the blog search engine pionier lets you search for tags or keyword phrases that were used by bloggers for their posts. You can use it to find out what people are saying about your competitor or your competitors products (or about you and your products). | |
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Facebook Lexicon lets you find out what people on Facebook are currently talking about a lot. You simply enter the keyword or keyword phrase where you would like to know more about and "Lexicon" will return figures that show you how much people are talking about it. You must have a (free) Facebook account to be able to access Facebook Lexicon. | |
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Twitter Search is the official real-time search for tweets by Twitter.com that contain the entered keyword or keyword phrase is a great tool to find out who is talking about a certain topic and also to learn what they are saying. | |
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TweetScan is a real-time search like the official Twitter Search, but has additional features that the official tool is missing, such as the ability to narrow the search by Twitter user and most importantly the option to sign-up to receive Email alerts to phrases where you want to monitor the twitter stream for. |
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Social Media monitoring and tracking tools to find out and keep track of what people are saying about you, your brand or your products on social media networks and sites like Twitter.com, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious and Blogs. |
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The UCLA Library Collection to Competitive Intelligence (Call Number: HD38.7) has over 70 publications to the subject of competitive intelligence available. | |
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WebExcellence Scorecards by Keynote offer bi-annual industry-specific scorecards that use a framework of 200+ expert-determined criteria to measure sites' ability to meet best practice guidelines. Keynote's Web Transaction Indices is a white paper on CI methodology. | |
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CI Webinars by SCIP, free for members, but not for non-members. SCIP also has a magazine to competitive intelligence that is only accessible for SCIP members. |
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Competitious is a free competitive analysis service by DreamThis, LLC. Competitious does not provide competitive data, but lets you keep track of your competitors activities and features provided in comparison to your own. The interface is designed for collaborative work of multiple peopleon the same "project". Updates about edits and additions are available via RSS to every team member. |
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Super Searchers on Competitive Intelligence The Online and Offline Secrets of Top CI Researchers by Margaret Metcalf Carr, founding director, Motorola's Intelligence, Jan Herring  |
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The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence How to See Through and Stay Ahead of Business Disruptions, Distortions, Rumors, and Smoke Screens by Leonard Fuld |
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Competitive Intelligence How to Gather, Analyze, and Use Information to Move Your Business to the Top by Larry Kahaner |
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The New Competitor Intelligence: Complete Resource for Finding, Analyzing, and Using Information about Your Competitors by Leonard M. Fuld |
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