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During my time at a big content marketing agency, competitor monitoring was something we did for our clients on a monthly basis.
Tracking competitors’ organic traffic, keyword rankings, and newly published pages added an extra dimension to analyzing our clients’ performance and helped us develop better strategies.
Whether your marketing role is related to SEO, social media, or email, there’s a competitor monitoring tool that will make the job easier. We break down our top picks below.
1. Ahrefs
With a paid Ahrefs account, you can get a deep dive into your competitors’ SEO and content strategies.
Pricing:
- Starter $29/mo
- Lite $129/mo
- Standard $249/mo
- Advanced $449/mo
- Enterprise from $14,990 per year
(If you don’t have an Ahrefs subscription, check out our guide to the best free Ahrefs tools.)
Let’s start with Site Explorer. It provides backlink and traffic data data of any URL or website.
In the “Overview” dashboard, you can get a quick look at the most important data points – from backlinks and monthly organic traffic to keywords and Domain Rating.
Click on “Backlink profile” to visually represent your competitor’s backlink growth.
Click on “Backlinks” in the left-hand menu to see all referring pages.
This way, you can see who is mentioning your competitors, which can help with your own link-building efforts. For example, you might discover a new website for guest posting outreach.
The “Best by links” report shows which pages have received the most internal and external backlinks, helping you:
- Understand what kind of content earns the most backlinks in your industry
- Discover broken pages you could replicate (but not plagiarize) and then ask the referring domain to replace the link to the broken page with a link to your resource
- Find newly acquired backlinks by setting the following filters “New + Show history: Last 30 days + Status: Newly published”
Site Explorer also provides a list of newly published pages by your competitors and their performance data. In the left-hand menu, click on “Top pages”. Then, set the status to “New.”
Scroll down to see the list of new URLs compared to the month prior or another date. Analyzing this data lets you gain insights into your competitor’s content strategy and how well their new content performs.
Additionally, Ahrefs can detect content changes on a webpage, allowing you to see how often your competitors refresh their content and how this impacts their organic search traffic. Enter the webpage URL into Site Explorer, then enable “Content changes.”
Each green bubble indicates a content change. Hover your cursor over the bubble to see the level of changes.
Each green bubble indicates a content change. Hover your cursor over the bubble to see the level of changes.
2. Klue
Klue is a competitive intelligence platform used by customer success, sales, product, and marketing teams. It provides detailed insights into your overall market, buyers, and competitors.
Pricing:
- Flexible. Not publicly available. Definitely on the more expensive side, at around $1-3k per month.
The platform collects data from numerous web sources to help you save time on manual Googling. Team members can also add insider intelligence to the platform and easily share it with the rest of the organization.
A “Klue board” showing in-depth company data. Image source: Klue G2
Klue allows you to cast a wide net by not limiting the number of brands, products, or verticals you can track.
The platform applies AI to analyze and filter data, eliminating about 87% of the total intelligence Klue collects. This leaves you with only the most relevant news.
On the integration front, Klue connects to various business tools, including Slack, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams.
3. Ad Libraries
The ad libraries of different social media platforms contain all the ads your competitors are currently running or have run. These ad libraries are completely free.
Use them to analyze how your competitors are positioning themselves. Or to discover their preferred platforms and ad creative formats.
Let’s start with the Meta Ad Library. It groups ads according to the month they were launched. Each ad includes information on the target platform, its activity status, and an ad preview. The call-to-action (CTA) is also provided, allowing you to go to the landing page and gather additional intel.
The Google Ads Transparency Center includes all ads published on Google Search, Display, and YouTube.
Sort the ads by format (image, text, video) or use the filters at the top of the page to narrow the results. Click on an ad to see when it was last shown.
There’s also LinkedIn’s Ad Library, which allows you to search ads by publisher and keyword. Click “View details” to see the ad format and CTA. If available, the CTA includes a link to the landing page.
4. Similarweb
Similarweb is a digital intelligence platform with products spanning market research, audience analysis, competitor research, and more.
Pricing:
- Starter ($125 per month)
- Professional ($333 per month)
- Team and Enterprise (custom pricing)
The company also offers several free tools. One of them is a free website traffic checker that provides a detailed overview of your competitors’ traffic data from different sources. This includes social, paid ads, referrals, and email, making it a great complementary tool to Ahrefs.
The free traffic analytics report for Copy.ai, for example, shows that the majority of desktop visits come from “Direct” traffic, followed by “Organic Search.”
You can also discover which social media platform drives the most traffic to your competitor’s website. If you’re a direct competitor to Copy.ai, then YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook are channels you should explore.
SimilarWeb also provides data on your competitor’s tech stack, grouped by use case. This allows you to identify tools that might be giving them a leg up in the market.
5. Visualping
Visualping detects website changes. When your competitors update their homepage copy, change their pricing, or add new content, you’ll be the first to know.
Pricing:
- Business 5k* ($35 per month)
- Business 10k* ($70 per month)
- Business 20k* ($140 per month)
- Business 30k* ($210 per month)
- Business 40k* ($280 per month)
- Business 50k* ($350 per month)
(*Refers to the number of checks per month.)
The free version allows you to track one page and offers a handful of advanced customization features. For example, you can set a threshold for changes or select a specific part of the page to monitor.
Visualping sends alerts via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. Each alert provides a summary of changes that can also include a visual overview for easier comparison.
The paid version of the tool also provides various customization options to prevent your inbox from being flooded with alerts. For example, you can choose to get notified only when specific keywords are removed from a website.
6. Owletter
Owletter is a competitor monitoring tool for email. It collects and analyzes all emails your competitor sends to their mailing list, helping marketers find inspiration for future email campaigns.
Pricing:
- Starter $19/mo
- Pro $39/mo
- Unlimited $79.mo
Once you’ve set up your account and started collecting emails, your inbox will include a graph overview of all emails captured over time. Filter the results by the website or website tags. You can also use the search function to find emails.
Go to “Email alerts & reports” to set up notifications. For example, you can get an alert every time a competitor sends an email containing the keyword “sale.”
Owletter also includes competitor email analytics. Go to “Monitored websites”, then click on any competitor to see their spam reputation, email sending frequency, and frequently used words
7. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management platform. It includes competitive analysis reports that compare your share of voice, engagement, and brand sentiment to your competitors.
Pricing:
- Standard ($249 per seat per month)
- Professional ($399 per seat per month)
- Advanced ($499 per seat per month)
- Enterprise (custom pricing)
The “Competitive Analysis” dashboard includes a summary of key metrics, color-coded for easy navigation.
Use Sprout Social’s performance reports from specific social media platforms to understand your competitors’ presence and engagement levels on different networks. You also have the option to filter the top trends and topics by competitor to see if they’ve recently gone viral.
Final words
Competitor monitoring tools can significantly enhance your business strategy, providing valuable insights and helping you stay ahead of the competition.
The tools highlighted in this article offer a range of features to suit different needs and budgets. By leveraging these tools, you can gain a competitive edge, make informed decisions, and drive your business toward success.
Stay proactive, keep an eye on your competitors, and watch your business thrive.
By Aida Knežević
Versatile content marketer
Aida Knezevic is a versatile content marketer working primarily with B2B SaaS companies. Having launched her career at a major content marketing agency, she has helped leading companies in fintech, digital marketing, and many other verticals achieve growth using SEO blogs, case studies, thought leadership, and other types of content.
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