A Guide to the top Competitor Analysis Tools

Competitor analysis is a lot easier when you have the right tools.

We’ve tried out a ton of different services over the years, so we feel confident in saying that these are the best.

1. SimilarWeb - Widely used as a traffic estimation tool, SimilarWeb has loads of cool features that let you peek behind the scenes at your competitor’s strategy.

Find out which channels are driving traffic to your competition - with stats for traffic distribution, top organic & paid search keywords, top ad networks, audience interests, and competing websites.

Sounds like a lot. And it is.

2. Ahrefs - Yes, we’re biased, but there’s a reason Ahrefs is consistently listed as one of the top SEO tools in the industry.

Our primary focus is SEO and content analysis, and you can use our tool to analyse competitor keywords (organic and PPC), backlinks, traffic stats and more.

Find out which pages on your competitor’s site are bringing in the most backlinks, social shares, and traffic, by running the ‘Top Pages’ reports. Or dig deep into their link profiles with Site Explorer.

With 192 billion pages in our database, we’ve got the largest index of backlinks on the web.

3. Audiense - This service will help you analyze your competitors’ audience based on their Twitter followers.

See stats on location, gender, interests, and the languages of those who follow your competitor.

4. Builtwith - Dig deep into your competitor’s website technologies and tools with this handy service.

Builtwith can uncover their web server, advertising services they use, analytics technologies, and much more. You can even find out which email services a given website is using.

5. WhatRunsWhere - Find out where your rivals are advertising and peek at the creative they are using for their ads.

Enter a domain too see its current adverts or pop in a keyword to see which ads run for it.

WhatRunsWhere’s creators claim that their data is updated daily, which will let you monitor changes in your competitor’s ad campaigns.

(AdBeat is a similar solution worth looking at.)

6. Compass - Although this tool is still in its early stages, Compass has already collected a database of 3 million unique ads across Facebook and LinkedIn.

Type in a relevant keyword to see who’s advertising on these strong social platforms in your niche.

7. Simply Measured - A free tool from SimplyMeasured called Facebook Competitive Analysis can easily compare your Facebook fan page with that of your rival.

It will show you general engagement stats for posts and a valuable metric of ‘Engagements as % of fans.’

8. Rival IQ - Rival IQ will analyze your social media performance across all the major social networks and compare it to your competition.

Add your competitor’s website to your dashboard to compare audience growth, post engagements, and top posts.

9. Fanpage karma - This service can show you the best (and worst) performing posts from your competitor’s Facebook fan page. Uncover the most frequently used words and hashtags, and analyse user reactions.

Fanpage karma will also give you hints on what type of content to post on Facebook, and the times of day to post, by analysing your competitor’s performance.

Plus you’ll get an estimate of the advertising value of your competitor’s Facebook posts.