12 competitor tracking tools to stay ahead of the competition

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?

What is competitor tracking?

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.

Why do competitor tracking?

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?

Types of competitor tracking tools and their use cases

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.

Why should I use competitor tracking tools?

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:

Competitor Tracking Tool	Key Features & Best Uses	Pricing
Attest	Measure NPS across your market  Send surveys to uncover purchase intent, brand recall, top-of-mind competitors, and more Get the most from your survey data with expert support	Learn about Attest’s pricing
SimilarWeb	See competitor traffic, including the source (organic, social, email, ads, etc) Understand the countries where your competitor is most popular Identify keywords competitors are targeting- and how you can use them to get ahead	Starts at $125 per user/month
BuzzSumo	Social listening capabilities to understand what competitor content is most shareable Identify top influencers in your market	Starts at $199 per month
Mention	Web listening feature to identify brand mentions in real-time Social listening capabilities (including Facebook and Twitter) Reporting on competitor mentions	$41 per month for a Solo plan
Google Trends	Discover search term popularity and related queries Compare brand mentions by geographic region Access geographic data and find out where customers are searching for key terms	Free
STAT	Competitor SEO strategy analysis  Receive reports from tracked competitor sites to compare performances	Tracking starts at $720 per month for up to 6,000 keywords
BrandMentions	Social listening Sentiment analysis	Starts at $79 per month
Spyfu	Competitive analysis SEO, keyword and backlink analysis	Starts at $16 per month
SEMrush	Competitor analysis Brand health tracking dashboard	Starts at $129.95
Hootsuite	Social media monitoring (especially for brand mentions) Performance reporting Task management and social media scheduling	Starts at $99
Brandwatch	Brand benchmarking against competitors Audience segmentation and customer targeting Social media monitoring Real-time charting	Available on request
Owletter	Competitor email marketing analysis Email campaign tracking	$19 per month

The best competitor analysis tools

1. Attest

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:

• NPS tracking across competitors – Measure your Net Promoter Score alongside your competitors to identify detractors, passives, and promoters
• Purchase intent research – Discover which brands consumers prefer to shop with and why
• Unprompted brand recall – Uncover how strong your messaging is compared to competitors without influencing respondents
• Fast insights from target consumers – Get results in hours instead of weeks or months
• Expert research guidance – Work with in-house research specialists to craft effective surveys

With Attest you also get:

• Powerful custom research features
• One platform for panel and own customer research
• Robust combination of AI and human data quality checks
• Easily compare markets and consumer segments side-by-side
• Dedicated Customer Research Manager

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.

2. SimilarWeb

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:

• Keyword opportunity finder – Identify untapped search terms competitors are missing
• Traffic source breakdown – See exactly where competitors get their visitors from (search, social, referrals, etc.)
• Geographic audience data – Discover which countries and regions are most valuable to your competitors
• Customer interest insights – Learn what other websites your competitors’ audience visits
• Competitive benchmarking – Compare performance against your top industry rivals

3. BuzzSumo

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.

Key features:

• Most-shared content analysis – Instantly see which competitor content gets the most engagement
• Backlink identification – Find websites linking to competitor content that might link to yours
• Influencer discovery – Connect with people who share content in your industry
• Content format insights – Learn what types, lengths and structures of content perform best
• Headline optimization – Discover the most effective headline patterns and word counts
• Competitor alerts – Receive notifications when competitors publish new content

4. Mention

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.

Key features:

• Real-time brand monitoring – See mentions as they happen across the internet
• Multi-source tracking – Filter mentions by platform (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news sites)
• Customer pain point identification – Discover where competitors are failing their customers
• Sentiment analysis – Track the positive or negative tone of competitor mentions
• Side-by-side comparison – Compare multiple brands’ mentions and sentiment simultaneously
• In-platform responses – Reply directly to mentions from within the tool

5. Google Trends

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.

Key features:

• Brand search tracking – Monitor how often people search for competitor brands
• Side-by-side comparison – Compare multiple brands’ search interest on the same graph
• Geographic insights – See where competitors have the most search interest by region
• Marketing campaign detection – Identify spikes in competitor interest that may indicate successful campaigns

Historical trend analysis – Track brand popularity over custom time periods

6. STAT

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.

Key features:

• SERP movement alerts – Get notified when competitors change position in search results
• Competitor performance reports – Pull comprehensive data on how rival websites are ranking
• Easy data export – Export any report data with a single click for further analysis
• Scheduled reporting – Receive automated reports delivered to your inbox
• New competitor detection – Discover emerging competitors you might not be aware of

7. BrandMentions

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.

Key features:

• Multi-platform scanning – Monitor all major social networks simultaneously
• Real-time mention alerts – See conversations as they happen across the web
• Sentiment analysis – Understand how people feel about competitors’ brands
• Market mood tracking – Track emotional responses to industry keywords
• Campaign inspiration – Discover opportunities to create campaigns that address market sentiments

8. Spyfu

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.

Key features:

• Competitor keyword discovery – See every keyword your competitors rank for
• PPC campaign analysis – Uncover which keywords competitors are bidding on
• Keyword gap analysis – Find valuable keywords competitors are missing
• Historical ranking data – Track how competitors’ rankings have changed over time
• Backlink profiling – Analyze competitors’ link building strategies

9. SEMrush

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.

Key features:

• Market Explorer – Immediately identify existing and emerging competitors
• Competitive SEO analysis – Learn from competitors’ SEO successes and failures
• Content gap analysis – Find topics your competitors rank for that you don’t
• Backlink auditing – See which sites are linking to your competitors
• Rank tracking – Monitor position changes for you and competitors
• PPC intelligence – Analyze competitors’ paid search strategies

10. Hootsuite

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.

Key features:

• Social conversation monitoring – Track mentions of competitors across social platforms
• Content strategy analysis – See what types of content competitors are publishing
• Audience response tracking – Analyze how people react to competitors’ campaigns
• Integration with listening tools – Connect with other monitoring tools for deeper insights
• Competitive benchmarking – Compare your social performance against rivals
• Unified dashboard – View competitive intelligence alongside your own campaigns

11. Brandwatch

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.

Key features:

• Emotional sentiment analysis – Understand how consumers feel about competitor brands
• Brand awareness benchmarking – Compare key metrics against industry rivals
• Audience segmentation – Identify which audience groups respond to which competitors
• Share of voice measurement – See how much conversation your brand owns versus competitors
• Campaign targeting insights – Learn who to target and with what messaging
• Real-time monitoring – Track changing sentiment as it happens

12. Owletter

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.

Key features:

• Email campaign monitoring – Capture and store all emails sent by competitor brands
• Relevance filtering – Get notified only about emails relevant to your business
• Send time analysis – Learn when competitors schedule their email campaigns
• Frequency tracking – See how often competitors email their subscribers
• Design inspiration – Access a library of competitors’ past emails
• Storage efficiency – View competitors’ emails without cluttering your inbox

Our top tips for using a competitor analysis tool

As well as our key steps below, we have a compilation of top competitive analysis tips from 20 experts.

Determine a goal

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.

Combine data for more context

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.

Stay alert

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. 

Start competitor tracking with Attest

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!