Monitoring your competitors is a key way to keep your business in check.
Why?
Another reason is to ensure that your standards are up-to-date. You can keep your finger on the pulse by knowing what businesses are doing in your sector.
You can also improve your products and services by better positioning, and thus win more customers.
How can you track your competitors? Which metrics should you use to track your competitors?
This is what we will be discussing in this post. These are the top metrics that you can use to monitor your competitors and to help you improve your business.
1. Keyword Targeting and Search Rankings
Ranking organically for the correct keywords today can lead to higher traffic, better conversion rates and greater profitability.
You can track the keywords of your competitors to see their performance in search results. This will help you get ideas for your keyword strategy.
To do this, you will need to use SEO tools. You can get insights from platforms like SEMrush and Ahrefs to see the top pages and keywords of your competitors and how much traffic they receive.
This information will help you strategize content marketing to maximize its effectiveness. You’ll also get ideas for blog posts and keywords that are less targeted that you can rank for.
2. Follow and engage on social media
You can track your competition using social media. It is also public information that can be tracked using social media listening instruments.
You can get an idea of the brand’s reach and awareness by looking at how many social media followers a company has.
You should also consider engagement rate. This will allow you to see how popular your competitors are and what their content resonates with their audience.
This metric can be obtained by multiplying the number (likes, comments and shares) by your followers. This proxy data will allow you to determine if your social media marketing efforts should be boosted.
3. Traffic
Traffic is the next metric. A website that has more visitors is more likely to rank higher in search results, and get more conversions.
SimilarWeb and Alexa are two tools that can help you gain insight into the traffic of your competitors. It will show you information such as the number of visitors, average time spent on site, bounce rate, and more.
These data are useful for understanding not only how much traffic your competitors get but also the quality.
Compare your website’s traffic to your competitors. You need to improve your website’s traffic if you aren’t getting enough. You can use lead magnets, blog posts, and free download content to increase traffic to your site.
4. Referring Domains and Backlinks
A website’s number of backlinks is an indicator of its authority and popularity. It is a sign that your competitors are popular and creating great content.
But, quality backlinks are also important. It boosts your authority if your competitors get backlinks from authoritative and reputable sites.
What do you think?
Backlink analysis tools can help you determine the authority of your website and check for backlink information.
You can make a concentrated effort to write guest posts on other websites or create pillar content for your website. This will naturally draw links from other websites. As you build your backlinks, your website authority will increase.
5. Revenue and Profit
Take a look at your competitor’s revenue and profit margins if they have publicly available financial information. This will give you an accurate picture of their financial situation and the areas where they are making or losing money.
This information is crucial because it will help you determine if your resources are being used efficiently. If you find out that your competitors’ profit margins are decreasing, this could be an opportunity to purchase them.
6. Email Metrics
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful marketing channels. It is also a great way track your competitors.
Sign up for their email newsletter to get a better idea of what they are creating, what they offer, and how often you receive them.
You can track the email marketing of your competitors using competitive email intelligence tools. These tools, which are usually created by email marketing service providers, can provide insight into various aspects of your competitors’ email marketing efforts. These tools include:
- How often do they email their subscribers?
- Segmentation depth in their email lists
- Deliverability rates refer to how many of their emails end up in the inboxes and how many land in the spam folder.
- There is overlap in audience between your email subscribers, and those of your competitors.
- Open rates and other engagement rates
Email intelligence tools that ethically use data to give you a view of your competitors’ email campaigns should be considered. You can gain an advantage by getting a glimpse into their strategy.
7. Brand Sentiment
Social media has made it easier than ever for people to assess brands.
Social listening tools can be used to monitor what people say about your competitors on social media, forums, or on review sites.
This information is very valuable as it allows you to identify what people love and dislike about products and services. This information can be used to improve your offering and create a positive impression of your brand.
8. Events
Another important metric to monitor is the number of events your competitor holds. These could include webinars, conferences or just meetups.
These events are usually listed on the website of the organization or on social media. You can keep track of the dates and attend if you can.
While it’s not essential to make detailed notes at such events, you should take note of the reactions and engagement of the audience. This can reveal a lot about people’s opinions about the products and services of competitors.
You may get some ideas for events similar to yours that you could hold for your audience. This will also help you understand what your competitors are doing right and wrong.
9. Experience and reviews of employees
Another metric you should track is the employee reviews and experience of your competitors.
Visit sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor to find out more. These sites allow employees to leave reviews about their experiences at different companies.
This information can be used to find out about the employee experience at a competitor’s company. This information is very valuable as it gives you insight into the culture and how they treat employees.
You’ll also get insight into their experiences and internal branding. If you notice that they work in a casual environment, it might help you understand why and how creative they are. You can also learn more about their compensation to determine if your business should offer better benefits to employees or hire competent people for essential tasks.
10. Ad campaigns of competitors
Advertising is a sign that your competitors are spending money. This is a sign they are working hard to reach their target audience, and increase their market presence.
It’s crucial to monitor their ads campaigns so you can increase your marketing efforts as needed.
Other useful information you can get from studying the ad campaigns of your competitors is:
- What keywords are they targeting?
- What kind of messaging are they using?
- Who is their target audience?
- Which platforms are they advertising on?
- How often and when do they run their campaigns?
- They leverage the type of visuals, offers, and phrasing that they use
This information will help you plan your advertising campaigns. It’s possible that your competitors are focusing on a particular keyword.
To differentiate yourself from your competitors or inspire your ads, you can look at the work of your competition.
You’ll also need tools to monitor the competition and generate reports. Here, SEO platforms as well as competitor analysis tools will be your best friends.
You can grow your business by following the competition
If you are able to track the competition, it can be a valuable source of information.
You’ll gain valuable insights by monitoring the metrics above that will help you grow your company. These insights can also be used to improve your products and services, reach more people, and hire better workers.
Don’t be afraid to compete with them. Instead, make use of them and keep track of them to give your company the boost it needs.