Best Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

There are dozens of marketing tools that you’re probably already using to monitor your own performance. These can be used to get competitive intelligence. Let’s assume you already know who the competition is. All you have to do is monitor these different areas.

Ad Monitoring Tools

Do you want to know where your competitors are advertising so you can do the same? Would you like to know which keywords they are targeting? If you want to troubleshoot your PPC and display ads, this set of tools will help you:
1. Adbeat is an enterprise tool that lets you see all of the ads that particular advertisers are using, split test their ad copy to help you with strategy, and find competitors you didn’t even know about. The introductory package starts at $99 per month, though that monitors only Google ads. There’s a 30-day free trial.
2. AdGooroo is a multifunctional tool that includes a Display Insight feature. The basic service lets you monitor ads for up to ten competitors, ranked by page views. Its Industry Insight allows you to figure out ad placements, too. Pricing is not stated.
3. AdGooroo also has an SEM Insight tool that incorporates keyword research, competitive intelligence, PPC and SEO tools, and traffic data. Pricing is not stated.
4. MixRank allows you to see the mix of ads that companies are using. You can see a snapshot of this data (without registering) that covers display ads, text ads, advertisers, and demographics, though you will have to create an account for the full report.
5. Moat provides a free ad search tool that allows you to key in your competitors’ brand names and see what ads they have shown recently. You can see the size and some of the places the ads have been seen recently, giving you a good guide for where to place your own advertising.
6. SocialAdNinja has a database of 400,000 social PPC ads. It’s a great tool for monitoring global Facebook advertising. It includes fine-grained search features so you can identify ads targeting your key demographic and find out which links they point to. There’s a single membership level at $147 per month.
7. WhatRunsWhere helps you monitor competitors to figure out their advertising strategy and where they are placing ads. As a bonus, it can help with advertising research and split testing, finding new sources of traffic, and ad buying.

Keyword Monitoring Tools

Related to ad monitoring tools are those that help you check out the keywords your competitors are targeting in their search marketing campaigns. Do this, and you can improve your own ROI by figuring out what’s working for them. Here’s a selection:
8. iSpionage looks at how your competitors are advertising with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo search marketing tools. You can view ads and track spending. It also includes SEO competitive research and a social monitoring tool for Twitter and Facebook.
9. KeywordSpy helps with competitive keyword discovery. You can find out how much your competitors are spending on AdWords and discover which combinations of keywords and advertising copy are working for them.
10. KeywordCompetitor helps you spy on organic and paid keywords, ads, and landing pages for your competitors, with daily updates in rankings. The site also has tools for monitoring competitors and working with affiliate marketing.
11. SEMrush lets you monitor competitors’ organic keyword positions, find relevant long tail keywords, see your competitors’ PPC ads, and more. It also includes SEO tools. There’s a wealth of data available from the free search bar on the homepage, though you will have to upgrade ($69.95 per month) for more queries and results.
12. SpyFu lets you see up to six years of data on your competitors’ keywords, ranking, and ads helping you with SEO and PPC advertising. There’s a limited free tool, though you have to subscribe for access to advanced competitive intelligence.
13. The Search Monitor looks at paid and organic search and even how you look against your competition in comparison-shopping engines. This multifunctional tool also monitors affiliates and trademarks as well as who’s discussing your brand. It starts at $299 per month.

Link Popularity and Backlink Tools

All of the tools you use to check who’s linking to your site can be used to research your competitors’ backlinks. All you have to do is plug in their URL. There are dozens of backlink checkers out there, but here are three excellent ones:
14. Ahrefs provides a wealth of information on external links, referring domains and IPs, top pages, main anchor text, linked domains, and more. There’s a limited free account covering 3 reports and 10 results, but for fuller data you’ll need to upgrade to the $79 per month package.
15. Majestic Site Explorer provides a detailed link profile for any site. In addition to working with current data, you also can check its historical index to see results over time. There is a limited free version.
16. Open Site Explorer describes itself as a search engine for links. It provides information on page and domain authority, linking domains, anchor text used, and more; you also can compare link profiles for up to five sites. It is free, though signing up for Moz Analytics gives you access to (much) more data.

Web Ranking Tools

How are people interacting with your competitors’ sites? The next set of tools provides website competitive analysis on consumer data to help companies improve their targeting in different segments.
A free search gets you data on unique visitors, rank, and competitive rank, but you’ll need to sign up for more in-depth tools.
17. Alexa has been tracking global web traffic for a couple of decades and using it to provide website ranking on a global and country basis. The traffic sources and other data can help with benchmarking your site against your competitors.
18. Compete describes itself as a “digital intelligence” tool which uses online consumer behavior.
19. SimilarWeb is a competitive analytics-monitoring tool that provides data on traffic sources, top content, social mentions, and more. There’s a lot of data available for free, including referral sites, search traffic, key topics and more. Pro packages start at $99 per month.

Monitoring and Mentions

Often recommended for monitoring mentions of your own brand, social media monitoring tools work equally well for seeing what people are saying about your competitors.
20. Google Alerts saves you the trouble of visiting the site to repeatedly perform the same search. Set up an alert and have the latest news about your competitors delivered to your inbox. It monitors news, blogs, video, discussions, and books, and it is free.
21. Mention combines media and social monitoring. It tracks content published on web pages, news sites, blogs, and forums in 42 languages. It provides real time social alerts and has an excellent mobile app. There’s a free plan, with the upgrade starting at $6.99 per month.
22. Social Mention provides real time search of brand mentions on blogs, microblogs, images, videos, questions, and bookmarking sites. This free web search tool also provides a broad brush sentiment analysis.
23. Talkwalker offers a service similar to Google Alerts, giving you the choice of monitoring news, blogs, discussions, or everything. You also can monitor content in different languages. It is free.
24. Topsy allows you to search tweets from 2006 forward, looking at links, photos, videos, influencers, and more. The free online search can provide a snapshot of a competitor’s Twitter presence, but you will need the pro version for real time results and alerts, reports, and identification of key influencers.
25. You also can use Twitter’s own search tool and save your searches, though the basic search doesn’t provide the depth that Topsy has.

Social Engagement and Social Sentiment Tools

This next batch of tools will help you to see how your competitors are building engagement and how their key audiences feel about them.
26. Commun.it is best known as a free tool for building engagement on your own Twitter account. Why not plug in the URL of your top competitor to see how that company is performing online?
27. Fanpage Karma allows you to input the URL of any Facebook fan page and assess the number of fans, growth, and a range of other performance metrics. There’s a 14-day free trial of additional features, and the premium package includes Twitter monitoring, too.
28. Login with your Twitter account and you can analyze any profile’s followers for free with Followerwonk. There’s a wealth of detail available on the authority of followers, recent tweets, bios and locations, enabling you to build a comprehensive picture of your competitor’s Twitter presence.
29. Open Social Buzz provides real time search of Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Plug in your competitor’s name and see how much social prominence they have.

A Mixed Bag

There are a few tools that don’t fit in any of the categories above, which can provide additional insight into what your competitors are doing.
30. BuiltWith investigates the technology behind your competitors’ sites, covering servers, content management, underlying technology, analytics, advertising, and much more.
31. Marketing Grader is a free HubSpot tool that assesses websites in terms of blogging, social media, SEO, lead generation, and mobile, giving an overall score. It’s a good way to see what your competitors are getting right, and wrong
32. Simply Measured rolls many of the tools on our list into one, including analysis of influencers, brands, trends, traffic, conversions, competitors, and more. It covers all the main social media channels with 35 different reports. The basic plans start at $500 per month, though there are free reports available for your own accounts.
33. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive lets you see how your competitors’ pages looked in the past. You never know, you might learn something about how website changes improved conversions.
34. Check out your competitors’ direct mail, email, and social campaigns with Who’s Mailing What. It’s a good way to keep track of trends, get ideas, and see what the competition is up to. This tool costs $747 per year.

Final Thoughts: Other Ways to Spy on the Competition

Don’t forget that there are three more ways you can find out what your competitors are doing, and they are all free.
35. Follow them on social media, add them to a list or interest group, and track what they are talking about.
36. Subscribe to their blogs so you can see what kind of content they are covering and check out announcements of forthcoming launches.
37. Sign up for their newsletter, which is hands-down the best way to see how they are targeting your ideal customers.

What other great tools have you discovered for tracking the competition?

About the Author: Chris is the CEO of TOFU Marketing, an internet marketing agency that helps startup companies hack their growth. You can request a free consultation with him here.

****Note : I am just sharing this Great Post published by Chris The visitor of this blog can directly view the original post by clicking on the source link given Below***** 

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http://blog.kissmetrics.com/

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How to Prepare for Product Ads - Best Ways to be Followed

Hot tips to help you make a success of this exciting new search marketing product

As a member of the Retail Account Management team here at Yahoo, I couldn’t be more excited to share our newest ad format within the search results page: Product Ads. Product Ads help retailers easily promote their products and offers in an eye-catching way within the search results page to complement traditional text ads. As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words.
Currently, we’re working with a select group of retailers to help them set up and manage their Product Ads campaigns ahead of the general release of Product Ads. (Please contact your account manager for further details and updates.)

To help you prepare to opt in to Product Ads, I’d like share some advice in the style of a famous late-night talk show host’s “Top 10 List.” OK, ours is a “Top 12 List,” so we’ve topped Letterman by two. (And, coincidentally my name is also Dave, so there.) Without further ado, here is…

Dave’s top 12 things you need to know about Product Ads:

12. Mind the gap: Product Ads help bridge the gap between shoppers’ searches and their purchases by offering a richer search ad experience that integrates product images into the ad. This will make your offering stand out on the results page, and ultimately help achieve a lift in performance.

11. Have it both ways: Product Ads are able to display along with text ads, meaning that you can potentially have both your text ads and Product Ads display at the same time for a search query, potentially pushing aside your competition.
10. Must-haves, part I: In order to use Product Ads, you’ll need the following:

• A Bing Merchant Center Account (Log in to your Bing Ads account > Tools > Bing Merchant Center)
• A product feed (see #9 for what this should include)
• A new Product Ads campaign created within Bing Ads

9. Must-haves, part II: Your product feed must have the following:

• Merchant Product ID (MPID)
• Title
• Brand
• Product URL
• Price
• Description
• Image URL

Other fields are optional. And yes, you can use a Product Listing Ad-formatted feed.

8. Name that store: The store name you create in the Bing Merchant Center displays with your Product Ads, so make sure to use a name that you want to display in the ad results.
7. Don’t try this at home: Do not add Product Ads to an existing text ad campaign. They just don’t play well together. You need to set up a new Product Ads campaign within your Bing Ads account. These campaigns will include Product Extension (only one may be created per campaign). This designates that the campaign is for Product Ads, which include 45-character promotional text and 10,000 Product Targets per ad group. Product Targets are your way of determining what type of queries result in specific products or categories of products contained within your feed. For example, if you are a department store and you have a women’s clothing department and a men’s clothing department, you wouldn’t necessarily want to use the same keywords for both men’s and women’s clothes (e.g., “blouse”). To ensure that you’re driving the right search queries to the right products, you can label products within your feed as either “men’s” or “women’s” and then use the Product Targets to target traffic specifically for those categories.
6. Get into the Import business: If you’re currently running a Product Listing Ad campaign on Google, you can easily import these campaigns to set up your product campaigns and targets in bulk.
5. Track that ad: Need to track Product Ads? Use the Bing Ads Redirect URL field when you set up your feed. This will override the Product URL field in the feed you provide when your Product Ads display. If you’re using a Google feed, it’s synonymous with the AdWords redirect field. This will allow you to effectively track your Product Ads campaign performance.
4. There are limits: Each account may have up to two million keywords, but although Product Targets are not keywords, they still count against this account limit. Consider creating a sub-account just for your campaigns/Product Targets.
3. Cover your bases: For your first Product Extension, I suggest selecting the All Products option. This will ensure that you have a campaign covering all your products included within your feed. Then create Product Extensions that are more targeted to your top product categories (see #7 for an example).
2. Budget and bid accordingly: Make sure you understand Bidding and Budget accordingly. For bidding, there are two options, an ad group bid and a custom bid. If you have a Product Target that’s targeting “All Products,” you are casting a wide search query net, and so, you’ll want to place a lower bid on that target. However, if you’re targeting “TVs > Flat Screen > Plasma > 42 Inch > 1080i,” you’re looking for very specific search queries, which means you’ll want to bid higher on this target using the custom bid option, because the consumer is further down in the buying cycle. Be sure to allocate additional budget to your Product Ads campaigns as you would be any new search campaign.
And a drum roll please…

1. Get more: Check out our recent Webinar “Get the Most Out of Product Ads,” in which our Product Ads experts share how to set up a Product Ads campaign and answer questions.

-- Dave Carter

Source : Yahoo! Advertising Solutions - Yahoo

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