6 Competitor Monitoring Tools to Boost Your Website Engagement

It has never been easier to monitor competitors in 2024. With so many ways to analyze your competitor’s online strategy, you can tap into their social media marketing success, website engagement, and projected campaign plans in just a few clicks.

Don’t just take our word for it. With over 56% of leading brands now revealing that they use media monitoring to keep an eye on their competitors, it’s no longer a case of ‘should you monitor competitors,’ it’s when will you start?

This article will explore the benefits of conducting a website-based competitive analysis and how to monitor your competitors’ website traffic and engagement.

Can You Monitor Competitors Using Their Website?

Believe it or not, there are many ways to monitor competitors using their website traffic and engagement stats.

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Using competitor analysis tools, you can gather data on various website-based metrics and insights to examine your competitors’ online performance and your potential to outperform them.

Here are some of the metrics you can track during a web-based competitor monitoring session:

Traffic Trends: Using competitor monitoring tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs, one of the easiest metrics to track is how much traffic your competitor receives at different times of the week, day, or season.

For example, if your direct competitors receive the most traffic on Saturdays, plan to release new products and deals on the same day while engagement levels are high within your niche.

Audience Growth: Is your competitor’s audience growing or declining? This could help you establish whether following your competitor’s lead would be positive or negative for your site growth.

Which Pages Drive Traffic?: With some competitor monitoring tools, you can view traffic analytics individually. Use this metric to determine which pages drive the most engagement for your competitor. This gives you more insight into which product/service pages you need to improve.

How Long Do Users Stick Around? Your competitor may drive lots of traffic, but how long does each user interact with the website? When monitoring competitors, look for the average visit duration and bounce rate to read their engagement rate.

Local vs Global Traffic: If you’re a local business, the most important traffic source is the one closest to your location. However, if you’re operating in a global e-commerce market, tracking which locations drive the most traffic for your competitors is essential. This metric will aid you in adjusting your targeting.

When you start competitor monitoring, you’ll find it easier to decide your website’s future. Did you know that competitor analysis tools can make your decision-making five times faster?

With that in mind, let’s examine six of the best competitor monitoring tools available on the market.

Six Competitor Monitoring Tools To Help You Track Competitor Engagement Online

Now that we’ve learned more about what to monitor when looking at competitor’s websites, let’s take a closer look at some of the best competitor monitoring tools for web traffic, social success, and competitor engagement in 2024.

Nutshell’s CompetitorIQ

First, we have Nutshell’s CompetitorIQ, a powerful competitor monitoring platform based on mapping traffic insights.

This clever competitive intelligence tool uses a tracker system to allow you to connect this analytic tool to your website and add up to five more competing URLs for comparison. It enables you to leverage visual data on your competitor’s market share of traffic, primary sources, and historical website performance.

Better still, Nutshell also combines web traffic analysis with CRM, offering its users advanced lead nurturing, contact management, and email marketing aids that can improve your brand strategy while measuring the growth of your fiercest competitors.

CompetitorIQ starts at just $16 a month for new customers and is free to those already using Nutshell’s CRM platform, rendering it one of the most affordable traffic analyzers in 2024.

Semrush

If you want to improve your website’s SEO, Semrush is a great competitor monitoring tool. This platform comes equipped with keyword research features, organic placement search, and a wide range of traffic analysis tools that can map different types of site engagement on search engines.

Semrush can analyze your traffic and up to five competitors. However, like Ahrefs, the tool can also quickly search any website for simple traffic analysis, such as the number of people visiting a page, the location of primary sources, and historical traffic trends.

Semrush also allows users to extract various reports on a competitor’s target audience, advertising spend, and the keywords each PPC campaign targets. These reports are vital when segmenting and targeting your audience and can offer brilliant insights for your growth strategy.

While this tool to monitor competitors and gather competitor data is more pricey, starting at $129.95 per month, it’s a brilliant choice for larger businesses that want to get ahead in a competitive SEO market.

Visualping

If you want to track how your competitor’s website changes, Visualping is a brilliant competitor monitoring tool.

By entering your competitor’s URL into the integrated search bar, you can find out what site elements they have recently updated.

This could be their UX design, product updates, brand messaging, or even something as small as changing the keywords within their copy.

You can monitor an entire page or focus on specific elements using Visualping.

With the option to get email notifications when changes on tracked competitor websites occur, you can stay on top of how they develop their strategy in line with changing market and demographic trends.

Visualping offers a free limited version, and premium prices start at $35 a month for their most basic paid plan.

Mention

To improve your website, looking beyond your competitor’s content is essential. Using Mention’s monitoring tool, you can analyze your rival’s sentiment score by tracking their brand mentions across the web and on social media.

Mention allows you to track any keyword or topic in relation to any brand. Using this tool to find out what your demographic is saying about your competitors on social feeds, blogs, and forums could help uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your closest rival’s online strategy.

Brand monitoring is essential to stay informed about these insights and leverage them to enhance your own brand’s performance and engagement.

With numerous filtering options, users can easily track down specific keywords, competitors’ content, and web pages. Rather than sorting through lists of mentions, this tool offers valuable indicators like reach or source to fine-tune your research, including sentiment analysis features to track how your brand is perceived.

A 14-day free trial is available for this comprehensive competitor monitoring tool. The cheapest plan starts at $41 per month and is equipped with in-depth social listening, competitor monitoring, and publishing features.

Price2Spy

Are you looking to change your pricing strategy but don’t know where to start? Or do you want to do competitor price monitoring to stay competitive in your market?

Look no further than Price2Spy. Price2Spy is a price monitoring and competitor analysis tool that checks your competitors’ pricing up to 8 times a day.

You can track promotions, detect price changes, know which competitors are the closest to your pricing, and more. This will give you a competitive edge in your market and let you stay on top of your industry instead of doing competitor research manually.

They offer a 30-day free trial, so give it a shot!

Ahrefs

Last but not least, if you’re looking for a traffic-focused competitor monitoring tool, Ahrefs compares competitor metrics on traffic share, bounce rate, average visit duration, and unique visitors to help you get ahead.

This is a brilliant search engine optimization tool to benchmark your traffic trends against your competitors.

With the ability to analyze infinite competitors’ domains against your own, Ahrefs provides an in-depth overview report full of visual insights on several customizable search topics.

Ahrefs is also your go-to tool for keyword monitoring, offering data for more than 150 billion keywords in the US alone.

While Ahrefs also offers a limited free version, the Lite version costs $79 per month, rendering it a pricier option. However, this tool won’t disappoint if traffic tracking is a top priority.

Why Should You Track Competitor Website Engagement?

“The strategic advantage behind compiling a competitive analysis is that it helps you get a better picture of the competition so you can try to emulate their success but also recognize and avoid their failure,” explains Christopher Tompkins, co-founder, and CEO of The Go! Agency.

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Competitor monitoring helps you further understand your marketing and industry while helping you identify gaps in your strategy for brand growth.

There’s a reason why over 90% of Fortune 500 companies have employed a competitive analysis tool to help track the website metrics of their competitors.

Here are some reasons to start competitor monitoring in 2024:

Outperform Your Competition

The biggest reason to invest in a competitive analysis strategy is to outperform your competition.

Tracking your competitors on their websites, social media channels, and even on the high street is a brilliant way to gain insights that will influence your brand’s success.

Employing a competitor monitoring tool will help you identify patterns of success, website weaknesses, and traffic trends. These will be actionable insights to help you shape your site strategy and predict future consumer trends within your niche.

Identify Your Opportunities and Threats

If you want to evaluate how well your competitors are performing in the online market, just look at the results of their current on-page SEO strategies. This includes keyword use, content creation, and promoting campaigns that aim to raise brand engagement.

Identifying a competitor’s SEO efforts and comparing them against the traffic they produce is a great way to find out what is working and what your target consumers are not interested in.

This allows your brand to profit from successful website strategies and avoid potential threats that could cause your engagement to fall.

Some of the key website strategies to look out for include:

• UX design choices
• Call-to-actions
• Keyword Rankings
• PPC advertising
• Blog content and internal linking
• New site releases and promoted campaigns

You can gather valuable insights about your competitor’s growth strategy just by looking at their website.

Whether you do this manually as an online viewer or employ a tool to pick out high-converting pages and keywords, you’ll open up your brand to more ideas for building a successful competing website and marketing strategy.

Stay Ahead of Market Changes

When you monitor competitors’ websites, you stay current with their latest product releases, blog posts, and creative campaigns.

This lets you quickly identify when a competitor’s site strategy changes in reaction to customer demand or the latest market trend.

If you spot these changes early, you can alter your site content to match the newest trends and stay ahead of market changes.

“Competitive intelligence allows you to stay ahead of trends in your industry. You can identify potential growth opportunities and develop your company’s efficiency and productivity. But the secret to success from competitive intelligence is to streamline this practice,” says Burc Tanir, CEO of Prisync.

“If your competitors are doing better than you, use competitive intelligence to find out how. Then, you can list the reasons and find areas to improve. Streamlining this practice allows you to address it immediately instead of waiting.”

Improve Search Performance

Google Search drives the online world. For a website to perform at its optimum online, you must be ranking for the key phrases and search terms that are likely to be used as organic keywords by your target consumers when they browse online.

With you and your competition likely competing to rank for the exact search keywords, using competitor monitoring to identify their target could put you at an advantage.

Once you’ve highlighted the search terms your competitor is ranking highly for, you can brainstorm other related alternatives they are not pursuing to get a chance to outrank them and improve your search performance.

Elevate Your Website Design

Did you know that over 65% of online users are visual learners? What your website looks like matters when it comes to increasing engagement.

If your design is hard to navigate or a landing page is too busy, it may leave a bad first impression on your target demographic.

The key is to conduct a UX audit of your competitor’s website to discover what design choices drive engagement and where traffic begins to dip.

When you monitor competitors’ websites, find the design features with the highest level of interaction and highlight elements with the lowest level of interaction before comparing them visually to see if you can identify any UX faults.

Monitoring your competitor’s design strengths and weaknesses for UX newbies could help elevate your UX strategy.

Gathering insights from competitor research on what design choices work well among your shared audience becomes an excellent stepping stone to creating your original UX design, which incorporates some traffic-driving factors.

Ready To Invest In Competitor Monitoring Tools?

As the search scene becomes more competitive, there has never been a better time to start tracking the actions of competing brands.

Your website is the biggest driver of conversions and often the first impression your brand can make on a consumer. Therefore, ensuring that your site strategy is polished to rank higher in a Google search is essential.

Adopting competitor monitoring tools allows you to stay ahead of market trends and leaders by helping you identify opportunities for your site to soar.

Want to monitor what people are saying about your competitors online? Try Mention!