What are the most valuable metrics to track when monitoring competitors?

Market Share: Understanding a competitor's market share provides insight into their dominance in the market. It can help gauge their influence and how it changes over time. Revenue Growth Rate: Track their revenue growth to understand their financial health and growth trajectory. This can indicate the effectiveness of their business strategies.

Measuring and comparing customer satisfaction of your company brand or product/service with your competitor play crucial role in strategic planning, especially in big corporates. This should be conducted by third-party side like research/survey agency, rather than by your company internal team, in order to avoid bias/manipulation and to ensure the highest level of transparency, fairness. Once you have a reliable picture of what market appreciates or dislikes your brand/product, you define the most proper strategies with focused resources to solve the gap and outperform the rivals in future.

If your trying to gauge your competitors customer satisfaction scores you have to closely monitor daily/monthly feedback received on their website, review portals, and complaint websites. The challenge is to be able to get a pulse of how a certain promotion performed based on customer sat scores and what customers pain points surfaced as a result. Another tip is to actually go through your competitor's full customer journey and document useful insights throughout your journey.

Assessing pricing and profitability of competitors at face value is certainly useful. However, one must always be aware that prices and profit are also levers that may be used to further other objectives, such as gaining market share or driving out competitors.

Many companies focus on physical qualities of product/service features when they should be focused on the perceived qualities. To use an example from my past, a automotive manufacturer may have the highest physical quality in their seat leather (e.g., as measured on stain resistance and durability), but if it's perceived as "plastic-y" by their customers, it's a fail.

I work in pharma market research. One of the KPIs of possible interest in CI is the intent-to-ask-by-name. Is a patient interested in a specific prescription and will they ask their healthcare provider for it, after having seen a DTC/print/online ad, through word of mouth, etc? There are vendors in the pharma space that collect this type of information on a regular basis.

Regulatory or Legal Changes: Keep track of any regulatory changes affecting competitors or any legal challenges they face, as these can impact their operations and market position. To effectively track these metrics, you can use a variety of sources including financial reports, market research, industry analysis, social media monitoring tools, and web analytics. Regularly monitoring these metrics helps in making informed strategic decisions and staying ahead in the competitive landscape.