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Head of Strategic Research
Competitor tracking is a powerful way to plan strategically and maximise your chances of success. Here are 14 excellent tools every consumer brand should know.
While many brands might wish they could eradicate it, competition is healthy. It keeps you on your toes and means you’re continually looking for ways to improve your offering. Competitor tracking tools can help unearth essential information to help give you a competitive edge.
The challenge, however, is effectively monitoring your rivals, so you don’t get left behind. What are they doing that you should be doing too? Have they overlooked an opportunity you could seize? Are they losing market share that you could gain?
Competitor tracking (sometimes called competitive market analysis) is a type of consumer research where you measure the awareness and perception people have of your competitors’ brands. You can compare this with what consumers think about your brand to gain a full understanding of your category.
By running competitor tracking you give yourself a thorough understanding of how your customers and potential customers perceive your competitors. Tracking this will make sure you’re on top of any possible shifts in customer loyalty or preference for certain brands over others—you can then take steps to boost your own brand’s standing in the market.
Competitor tracking enables consumer brands to plan strategically and maximise their chances of success. You can track a range of metrics: what’s being said about you and your competitors, but also what they are doing in terms of marketing efforts.
What does their SEO look like? How can you beat their email marketing campaigns? And how do people feel about the different competitors in the market?
Competitor tracking comes in many forms, each designed to give you insights into different aspects of your competitors’ activities:
Brand perception tools: These help you understand what consumers think about your competitors compared to your own brand. They’re perfect for uncovering sentiment, loyalty levels, and purchase intent.
Social listening tools: These monitor social media platforms and the wider web for mentions of competitors, allowing you to track sentiment, engagement, and trending topics. They’re ideal for staying on top of how people talk about your competitors online.
SEO and content analysis tools: These analyse your competitors’ website traffic, keyword rankings, and content performance. They’re essential for understanding their digital strategy and finding opportunities to outrank them.
Advertising and campaign monitoring: These tools track competitors’ ad campaigns, email marketing efforts, and promotional activities. They’re valuable for understanding their marketing budget allocation and messaging.Website traffic and performance tools: These analyse how much traffic competitors get, where it comes from, and how visitors engage with their site. They’re crucial for benchmarking your digital performance.
It’s safe to say that the success of your marketing efforts is directly connected to what your competitors are doing. If you want to stay ahead of them, you’ll also need to keep an ear to the ground to find out what they’re up to. Simply to out-perform them.
But running competitor tracking and carrying out competition mapping can be time-consuming and hard to keep up with. From social media to SEO and from discounts to new offers: how can you keep an eye on all of this, without wasting time on the wrong things?
The tools we’ve gathered in this list all cover specific areas of competitor tracking, based on what you want to focus on. They take out the guesswork and require almost no manual work to get detailed and actionable insights.
While these tools are running in the background and reporting back to you, you can keep working on those campaigns and strategies that will help you beat the competition.
Here, we walk you through fifteen of the most useful competitor tracking tools, offering invaluable insights into things like your rival’s web traffic, content virality and consumer brand awareness levels. Keeping tabs on these will help you to both anticipate your rival’s next move and plan your own.
Here’s our TL;DR list of competitor tracking tools to whet your appetite:
Best for: Understanding consumer brand perceptions and measuring how you stack up against competitors.
Nobody’s better at marketing your brand than your own customers. We have yet to see an online ad that’s more convincing than the genuine advice of a friend you trust or colleague you respect. What they say about you and your competitors can have a real snowball effect in your market.
And while that sounds abstract, it can actually be measured and mapped out, so you can act accordingly. There are several metrics you can look at, from NPS to purchase intent and brand recalls. We’re here to help you figure out, well, all of them.
Key features for competitor tracking:
With Attest you also get:
Here’s a real-life example of an NPS question from a survey we sent to 500 makeup shoppers ⬇️
The Attest platform allows you to ask any question you would like of your target consumers, under the guidance of in-house experts, to get the answers you need. You’ll get the results in a matter of hours and days, meaning you can act ASAP and when the data is relevant.
Get ahead of your competitors
Attest gives you insight into your and your competitor’s position so that you know exactly where you stand and how you can win.
Best for: Analyzing competitor website traffic sources and discovering keyword opportunities they’re missing.
SimilarWeb is a competitor tracking tool that allows you to enter the URL of any website and instantly see how much traffic it’s receiving. The insight, however, goes much further than this, showing you the source of the traffic i.e. direct, organic/paid search, social, referrals, email or display ads.
Key features:
Best for: Discovering your competitors’ most successful content and connecting with influential sharers.
BuzzSumo is a competitor tracking tool that shows you how successful your competitor’s content is by highlighting the pieces most shared on social media. Just enter your rival’s URL to see their top content and the number of shares and engagements achieved across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Best for: Monitoring real-time conversations about competitors across the web and social media.
Mention is a competitor tracking tool that provides a web listening service and lets you know what people are saying about your brand or your competitor’s brands. Simply enter the name of the brand you’d like to track and specify the priority pages for monitoring, such as the company’s website and social profiles.
Best for: Comparing search popularity of competing brands across different regions and time periods.
Google Trends is one of the lesser-known Google tools, but offers a great way to keep track of branded searches — in other words, how many people are searching for you or your competitors.
Historical trend analysis – Track brand popularity over custom time periods
Best for: Getting alerts whenever competitors move up or down in search rankings.
STAT lets you take a peek into your competitors’ SEO strategies. Tell STAT which competitors you want to watch and it will provide alerts every time they move up or down the SERPs (search engine results pages), so you can monitor exactly what they’re up to.
Best for: Tracking real-time social media conversations about competitors and analyzing sentiment.
Want to keep track of what people are saying about you and your competitors on social media? BrandMention’s Social Mention tool allows you to scan different platforms and types of media at the same time and gives you examples of what’s being said.
Best for: Uncovering competitors’ most profitable keywords for both organic and paid search.
If you’re looking to ‘expose the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors’, you don’t need to send an actual spy over there. With Spyfu you learn everything you need to know about their paid traffic and even backlinks.
Best for: Comprehensive competitor SEO analysis and identifying potential market threats.
If you’re looking to beat your competitors on SEO, you can’t go without SEMrush. This is one of the most popular keyword tools out there. It allows you to see how well your competitors are doing when it comes to SEO — and thus how you can beat them.
Best for: Monitoring competitors’ social media activity while managing your own campaigns.
Your own marketing efforts and their results are directly influenced by what your competitors are doing. If only you had a person on the inside, right? No need for espionage. There are easy ways to see what others in your market are doing.
Best for: Understanding the emotional response consumers have to your competitors’ brands.
It’s not just how many people are talking about you, it’s about what they’re saying. Scratch that, it’s about what they’re feeling when it comes to your brand, and your competitors. You want to be the one to give them butterflies, goosebumps, and the feeling they’ve come to the right place.
Best for: Analyzing competitors’ email marketing campaigns without subscribing to their lists.
If you want to know what your competitors are doing when it comes to email marketing, but don’t feel like clogging up your inbox by signing up to all their newsletters and downloading all their content offers, Owletter is here to help.
As well as our key steps below, we have a compilation of top competitive analysis tips from 20 experts.
Before you get started with entering their domain name everywhere, sit down and think: what is it that you really want to know? Choose your competitor tracking tools wisely: data that is not actionable or relevant to you right now can distract you from areas in which you could make quick wins.
If your own data is showing that your SEO isn’t performing as strongly as it could be, analyze your own efforts and those of your competitors. If you’ve been slow with social media, educate yourself on what the competition is doing on there before you launch your own campaigns. If you’re unsure how to win market share, speak to your consumers via these tools to understand pain points and perceptions of competitor brands that you can leverage.
If your competitor tracking tool is showing that way more people are mentioning you online than your biggest competitor, don’t count yourself lucky just yet. What is it they’re actually saying? Not all attention is good attention, after all.
Based on the objectives you’ve set, find out what data and tools you should combine to get the complete picture of what is going on in your market.
For instance, combine Attest with a social listening tool like Mention. We will help you identify what brands are popular amongst your target audience, and what their buying reasons are. Then you can hop onto social media to find out what their fans are saying about them. This will give you a solid foundation for improving anything from your messaging to your product.
Another strong team is Alexa and Answer The Public. Alexa will tell you what keywords your competitors are ranking higher on. With Answer The Public, you get an idea of what people want to know related to these keywords, allowing you to create content with the highest possible value.
It’s likely your competitors are changing their strategies from time to time. Maybe even based on what they found out when tracking you. That’s why competitor tracking isn’t a quick fix: make it a recurring practice in your marketing efforts.
You can take a moment every few weeks or months to look at what your competition has been doing and if you can adjust what you’re doing accordingly, and if you’re outperforming them – or there’s room for improvement.
Ignoring what your competitors are up to when planning your sales and marketing strategy is like going into battle without any enemy intelligence. Don’t go in blind; you can use these fifteen tools to easily gather insights, which will prove invaluable when making strategic decisions.
And by understanding how your brand performs in the context of your competition, you can better monitor your own success. Are you on track to become the market leader or in danger of being crowded out? Don’t let any developments take you by surprise; stay on top of your game and show the competition what you’re made of!
Competitor tracking (sometimes called competitive market analysis) is a powerful way to plan strategically and maximize your chances of success. Competitor tracking is a type of consumer research where you measure the awareness and perception people have of your competitors’ brands. You can compare this with what consumers think about your brand to gain a full understanding of your category.
The most efficient way to track your competitors is by using competitor tracking tools like Attest. These tools will take a lot of the manual work out of your hands and give you a dashboard in which to easily track trends, spot opportunities and see developments over time. With Attest’s competitor tracking, you can send surveys to a laser-targeted audience. Book a demo to chat with our team and see how Attest can help your business.
The best competitor analysis tool for your business depends on your needs, objectives and budget. If you’re looking for a complete research tool that also gives you dedicated research support, look no further than Attest. It’s a powerful survey tool that is easy to use, yet delivers best-in-class market research results, and dives deep into what consumers think about your competitors.
Nick joined Attest in 2021, with more than 10 years' experience in market research and consumer insights on both agency and brand sides. As part of the Customer Research Team team, Nick takes a hands-on role supporting customers uncover insights and opportunities for growth.
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