Affiliate marketing is a very competitive industry. Affiliates all over the world are trying all sorts of things to get an advantage of higher payouts. Sometimes those strategies revolve around optimizations and analyzing data, while other times those strategies are more tricky. In the latter, you might need a hand of competitor analysis software, or simply spy tools.
Many affiliates commonly apply a strategy of using competition spy tools. While some may say that there’s something wrong with it, it well became an industry standard for running successful advertising campaigns.
These competitor analysis tools can help you learn what other marketers are doing and what exactly is working, and what is not. All of this data is available without you having to spend your resources on running and testing those campaigns yourself. With proper usage of these tools, you can make your campaigns run incredibly well and optimize them for a fraction of the cost that you would usually have to pay for!
What Are Competitor Analysis Tools
Competitive analysis tools will help you track, analyze, and learn from your competitor’s strategies.
These tools are made to help you gather valuable information that you can use for your campaigns by accumulating experience of others. They will give you insight into your competitiors’ weaknesses and strengths. Utilizing these tools properly can make your campaigns far more profitable and successful without having to spend extra time on testing your ideas and guesses.
Why Do You Need Competitor Analysis Tools
As you probably know the competition today is fierce. A lot of people are joining the industry and putting their twist on it. New methods of advertising are being tested each day, and there are some incredible optimizations and methods that most affiliates aren’t keen on sharing. If you don’t have insane budgets to test all of these new developments, you might be missing out on some incredible things that you could implement. This is where competitor analysis tools come in handy.
With them, you can research exactly what your competition is doing. You can take a peek inside of their campaigns. How they run them, where they run them, how much they spend, what they are doing differently, and how profitable it all is. This information is incredible and without it, starting affiliate marketing and being successful at it is near to impossible. This is why more and more people are starting to use these spy tools. They offer a lot of valuable data for a fraction of the cost you would need if you wanted to get that same data from your own campaigns. All you gotta do is find the right tool, enter the account name of your competitor — and you have data about their ads at a glance.
Top 8 Competitor Analysis Spy Tools
Now, let’s see what are the top competitor analysis tools to spy on other marketers.
Phlanx
Phlanx will show the exact number of followers, its engagement rate, and average interactions per post. This tool is incredible for when you want to partner with some Instagrammers or you want to see how your competition is doing on the platform. Just keep in mind that you need to take these numbers into context. Some big brands have incredibly low engagement rates only because they have a massive following. Their actual like / comment ratio is good, but it gets skewed when looking through percentages. Luckily, Phlanx makes these differences easy to spot.
Social Blade
If you ever tried to become a YouTuber, then you know all about Social Blade. This platform gives you access to valuable data on accounts on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other services. The platform itself is very optimized and easy to use. You can search up the accounts you want to see results for and you will see data for it. This data is usually displayed as an average sum of followers, engagement, etc. But it can also be displayed as day-by-day data.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most famous platforms for SEO research on the market. This tool is almost a requirement for any marketer seriously considering SEO optimization. With this competitor analysis tool, you can explore any page you want. You will see what keywords are used, how it ranks in specific places, how much traffic it gets, backlinks, and how many referrals it has. All of this can be very useful as you can try to research those keywords further and optimize your page to contain more low-competition-high traffic ones.
Buzzsumo
This tool allows you to look at content for relevant topics for your and your competitors’ brands. This tool analyzes engagement and shares on social sites and tracks them. This can give you insight into the leaders in specific industry content. You can find out exactly who ranks how well for which topics. It can also help you identify new topics that are trending but not oversaturated by your competition.
Publisher Discovery
While it may not classify as a classic spy / competitor analysis tool, it still can be a very valuable source of information for your advertising. Let’s see why.
The extended Publisher Discovery suite includes powerful tools to identify affiliates by advertisers. So advertisers can see which affiliate websites are linking to competitors’ affiliate programs to identify what affiliates you are missing out on.
Another popular feature is Gap Analysis allowing you to see the list of websites and, which advertiser they link to — and, therefore, the gaps in your own program.
It’s an easy way to find and recruit publishers and advertisers for your affiliate program.
Also, check out one of our latest streams with CMO from Publisher Discovery to learn more about what this tool offers for your advertising.
AdPlexity
Adplexity analyzes your competition in a different way. This software is classified as a spy tool. It can give you insight into your competition’s ads and advertising campaigns. You can take a look at what creatives, copy, headlines, and targeting your competitors are using and on which platforms they are advertising. The best part of it is that you can see how much traffic these ads get as well. So you can analyze all of what they are doing in detail. You can use this info to improve your campaigns and increase your profit margins without having to spend time and money doing all of that research yourself.
SEMRush
SEMrush is probably one of the most famous and complete competitor analysis tools that you can find. This research tool is created to cover a variety of approaches to seeing what your competition is up with. SEMrush can cover SEO, PPC, keywords, Social media, PR, content, and much more. In total, you will find over 30 incredible tools that can do a variety of things. With proper usage, you will get a deep understanding of your competition’s actions through SEO and keywords.
Brand 24
Brand24 is a media monitoring tool you can use to track web and social media mentions of predefined keywords relevant to your competitors. More than that, it offers extensive analytics to put this data into perspective. You can easily track mentions on the web, such as company name, product, campaign name, etc.
Brand24 collects publicly available data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blogs, forums, and other online channels. You can use this tool for:
- online reputation monitoring and management
- hashtag analysis
- tracking customer feedback
- analyzing marketing campaigns
Final Words On Competitor Analysis Tools
The benefits of competitor analysis tools are very clear. They offer invaluable information and data for only a fraction of the price needed to get that data from your campaigns. With proper usage, they can help you expand and optimize your campaigns and ensure higher earnings from them.
With these Competitor analysis tools you can
- Understand the market and industry better
- Optimize your campaigns further for better profitability and scalability
- Discover your audience’s interests
- Discover new audiences
- Improve your strategy
- Improve your content
- Discover new keywords
- Avoid already used keywords for lower competition
- Identify pros and cons to specific approaches and campaigns
- Find new opportunities
As you can see, these tools can be incredibly valuable for your campaigns. Utilize them as much as you can and you will quickly see that there are a lot of improvements you can make by analyzing what your competition is doing!
Beyond Spy Tools
However, never forget about the data on your own advertising & marketing efforts. After you made a proper research on your competitor’s activities and started running your own masterpieces, pay attention to tracking their performance. Using spy tools works like magic when combined with simple ad tracking & attribution functionality. That’s where RedTrack leads the way by shedding light on valuable data about your performance.
