35 Competitor Analysis Tools To Improve Your Marketing Campaigns

Competitors are a great place to start when it comes to gaining industry knowledge and finding inspiration for your client’s marketing campaigns. Understanding the key strategies being used by their top-performing competitors on multiple social media platforms provides your agency with the insight and knowledge needed to gain a competitive edge.

The point is not to completely steal their ideas. Rather, it's a way to gain insight and understand what's working, and what’s not so that you can model their success or find better strategies.

Our natural drive is to innovate — to create something unique and original.

Yet, some of the greatest innovations in history came about as the result of emulating others. From technology to art, everything is a remix. As Picasso put it: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

When it comes to the art and science of digital marketing, the same holds true. We need inspiration from others to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. After that, things get interesting.

This post covers why these tools are a must-have for agencies, a list of the top competitive analysis tools (including a few free competitor analysis tools), what you can learn from them,  and how to choose the best one for your agency. 

• What Is Competitor Analysis?

• Why Competitor Analysis Tools Are Crucial for Agencies

• Top 35 Competitor Analysis Tools 

• Finding the Best Competitor Analysis for Your Agency

What Is Competitor Analysis? 

Make better marketing decisions on your client’s behalf by doing competitor analysis. Keeping an eye on their competitors’ top keywords or their paid ad campaigns, for example, helps your agency create an informed, proactive strategy.  Narrowing in on competitors in their specific industry and researching how and why they do things differently reveals opportunities to help your client’s business grow. It’s a tried and true strategy that helps position agencies as invaluable experts to their clients. 

Why Competitor Analysis Tools Are Crucial for Agencies

Competitor analysis helps your agency find unique advantages and identifies any potential barriers to strengthening your client’s marketing campaigns. Whenever your agency can position itself as the expert and clearly communicate that to your clients–do it. If you’re looking at their competitor's strategies and demonstrating how their business can remain proactive instead of reactive, they’re likely to be your client for a long time. Everybody wins. 

And the best (and most efficient) way to do this is by using tools and software that exist for these purposes. As you scale your agency, you won’t have time to manually look into each competitor on each platform they may be using. Even combine SEO and PPC data in a SEM reporting tool to view your progress across two crucial channels.

So why do competitor analysis? 

“Doing competitor analysis helps us stay in touch with what platforms, ad formats, keyword targeting, and creative ideas the competition is using. We gain insights into our own campaign success or failure, set benchmarks, and stay ahead–if we're doing the best. It also gives us ideas for new areas, platforms, or ad formats to use for our own marketing, that we may not have tried yet.” 

- Stuart Pereira, Campaign Manager (Paid Marketing), WSI Comandix. 

Top 35 Competitor Analysis Tools 

We’ve created a list of some of the top competitor research tools that many agencies use to keep their clients ahead of the competition. Some of the tools are a one-stop shop solution that do it all, and others are designed for specific services. We’ve broken the list into six different categories of digital marketing services to make it easy for your agency to decide: 

How We Chose Our List

We chose this list of the best competitor analysis tools based on each crucial part of digital marketing that your agency should be monitoring all of them to uncover any competitors for your clients. You don’t want to be focusing on website competitors and completely forget about social media competitors, for example. 

These tools are not only trusted but used on a daily basis by many agencies. See for yourself on software review sites like G2 to find out what others have to say about a particular tool you want to try. We recommend developing a strategy that lets you tackle each of these tools one at a time to find what works best for your agency.

1. Ad Intelligence Tools: Use these to help extract actionable insights, boost your clients’ ad performance, and get the most out of their budgets. 

2. SEO Competitor Analysis Tools: Pinpoint your client’s top competitors on the SERPs and get the actionable data they need to ramp up their web pages and surpass rivals. 

3. Content & Traffic Analysis Tools: Identify where your client’s audience is coming from and what specific content is resonating with them to increase potential conversions. 

4. Monitoring & Mentions Tools: Understand what others are saying about your client’s brand and generate better response times, improved processes, and satisfied customers. 

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Tools: Automate data collection by using a PPC competitive analysis tool that saves your agency hours of time compared to manually investigating competitors. Spy on their pitfalls and emulate their success to keep your clients ahead and better manage their PPC budget.

6. Social Media Tools: Figure out what’s working and what’s not on your clients’ social media channels. Social media tools help your agency monitor the growth of competitor profiles, the hashtags they use, and their engagement rates to help inform strategies for your clients.

AD INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

1. Adbeat

Adbeat is an enterprise ad analytics tool that reveals the exact ads used by advertisers. There is also a split-test feature, letting you test your ads to find winning copy.

Adbeat works by taking data from 40+ data centers and hundreds of servers and turns that raw advertising data into competitive insights. By using up-to-date data from ad networks, publishers, and competing advertisers, you're able to get extremely granular with your media planning.

Adbeat was originally built for affiliate marketers but also works very well for advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad networks. Any agency looking to better understand which ads perform best in a given market (before spending money on media buys) will benefit from Adbeat's platform.

Pricing: Starts at $249/month

2. Moat

Owned by Oracle, Moat describes itself as brand intelligence and analytics for brands, publishers, and platforms. To deliver value to their customers, Moat claims to measure real-time Attention Analytics over 33 billion times per day.

Moat is divided into two core products:

• Moat Analytics: This SaaS is focused on tracking ad impressions and content views to help brands and publishers measure and drive attention across multiple platforms.

• Moat Pro: This is an enterprise marketing and ad intelligence platform for mobile, direct, and programmatic advertising.

In order to use Moat for competitor analysis, simply search for your client’s competitor and the tool will show you their latest ad designs, as well as the publishers that display the ad. Use this information to help craft the creative and calls-to-action for your client’s ads and also potentially find new sources of traffic.

Pricing: Contact to request demo and pricing details

3. Pathmatics

Pathmatics is a marketing intelligence platform built for agencies, brands, and publishers that lets you see where competitors' ads are served, their ad spend, impressions, and digital strategies.

Powered by Nielson’s digital ad intelligence and Kantar Media, the platform has digital advertising data for social, native, desktop display, mobile display, desktop video, and mobile video.

Many customers say this platform is user-friendly and easy to understand the competitive insights.

Pricing: Available upon request

4. WhatRunsWhere

WhatRunsWhere is a digital ad intelligence platform that lets you see where competitors are advertising and what their ads look like. By seeing the top-performing creative in your client’s niche, you identify winning campaigns to help guide their ad strategy.

The platform also provides information on which traffic sources and networks their competitors are using so you know where to focus your efforts.

This ad intelligence software currently boasts access to data on 90k advertisers, 20k sites, 500 networks, and 60 million ads.

Pricing: Starts at $299/month

SEO COMPETITOR ANALYSIS TOOLS

5. AgencyAnalytics

While AgencyAnalytics is best known as a powerful all-in-one digital marketing analytics reporting platform, it also includes a full suite of SEO tools to help agencies take advantage of all of the long-term benefits of SEO, one of which is built for competitive analysis.

This tool helps agencies understand how their clients stack up against the competition by identifying which keywords they’re ranking and how much of the competitive SERP space your client owns. It helps you quickly analyze SERPs and monitor keyword rankings to find close competitors who appear in the top 10 positions for target keywords.

Use advanced insights such as Trust Flow & Citation Flow to monitor who reaches the top of the search engines–your clients or their competitors.

After you’ve performed your client’s competitor analysis, add those insights to an automated client report or dashboard to show your clients new opportunities for them to grow their business.

Pricing: Plans start at $12/month per client campaign (minimum of 5 campaigns). Start your 14-day free trial here. 

6. Link Explorer by Moz

Moz's Link Explorer is a long-time favorite tool of digital marketing agencies and is one of the most widely-used backlink checkers and website analysis tools online today.

The tool provides your agency with link metrics for any website including Page Authority and Domain Authority to research your client’s competitors and determine if they’re worth targeting.

Link Explorer shows you a massive database of any competing links, helping you target those sites with your client’s link-building and content-marketing campaigns. The platform claims to have data on 37 trillion links, 656 million domains, and 6 trillion pages.

Pricing: Free to try, plans start at $99/month

View all of your client’s Moz backlink data with the AgencyAnalytics all-in-one platform. Start your 14-day free trial and deliver professional client reports and marketing dashboards that clients understand.

7. Ahrefs

Ahrefs comes with a full suite of competitive intelligence tools running on a database of 16 trillion backlinks and 3 trillion URLs.

The main Ahrefs’ tool to analyze competitors’ performance is called Site Explorer. With this tool, your agency gets an in-depth look at the search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL including both organic traffic and paid traffic.

Aside from analyzing each domain individually, their Rank Tracker tool helps you monitor your client’s search engine rankings over time and chart performance against their competitors.

Ahrefs Content Explorer has similar functionality to Buzzsumo. Input a URL or keyword, and it returns the top competitors' content for that keyword, ranked by social shares, organic traffic, referring domains, and Domain Rating (Ahrefs' equivalent of Domain Authority).

Pricing: 7-day free trial for $7, then $99/month

Create real-time dashboards to show your clients their backlink metrics. The Ahrefs integration in AgencyAnalytics makes the entire process effortless to save your agency time. Start your 14-day free trial. 

8. Majestic

Similar to Ahrefs and Moz's Link Explorer, Majestic was originally a backlink checker that has slowly evolved into a full-stack marketing intelligence tool.

It's worth noting here, however, that the tool doesn't introduce any groundbreaking backlink or link-building features. When doing competitor analysis, Majestic's "Top Backlinks" and "Anchor Text" reports are the most useful, both from an information perspective and also because of their simple and intuitive UI.

Multi-site backlink analysis is one feature that Majestic does better than the others. Dramatically accelerate link-building efforts for a particular keyword by grouping up to 150 competing URLs and pull all of the backlink data at once. 

Pricing: Free trial, then $50/mo

Add Majestic SEO data to your cross-channel marketing reports with AgencyAnalytics. Start your 14-day free trial and leave the screenshots and spreadsheets behind!

9. Long Tail Pro

Performing competitor analysis is a crucial step before your agency decides to spend time (and your client’s money) trying to rank for a particular keyword. It's important to analyze each of the top SERPs and decide whether a keyword is worth going after.

Long Tail Pro does all this for you, identifying the weak points in their competitors' keyword coverage, so you know exactly which keywords to target. To find out which keywords would make the most money just enter your client’s keyword or group of keywords and LTP returns a long list, ranked by profitability.

Long Tail Pro has been around for a long time, but it seems to keep getting better with age, thanks in part to a group of SEOs and developers who regularly update the software.

Pricing: 7-day free trial, then starting at $37/month

10. Monitor Backlinks

When it comes to competitive analysis, Monitor Backlinks is on par with the other tools mentioned here, providing a treasure trove of competitor data.

Monitor Backlinks helps agencies to sort their client’s links by several filters, add tags, check backlinks index status in Google, and identify redirects and errors. Just as with Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz, Monitor Backlinks also provides details about anchor text distribution, and even includes a “keywords ranking tracker” for Google.

Unlike the "big three" backlink checkers, Monitor Backlinks does something unique by sending email alerts when your client’s competitors get new links. This is an amazing feature for ensuring that your client is included alongside mentions of competing brands. 

Pricing: 30-day free trial, then starts at $25/month

11. NetPeak Checker

Netpeak Checker is a tool for SERP scraping and data aggregation from the top SEO services. 

Netpeak gathers data from a long list of sites then displays it all in one dashboard. It's a great tool for agencies who want to look at the overall landscape of their client’s competition within a particular niche.

For example, you may find that a certain group of competitors has more Facebook comments than others. You should inspect those sites to see what kind of social media campaigns they are running and optimize your client’s campaigns.

Pricing: 7-day free trial, then starts at $19/month

12. Hubspot Website Grader

Website Grader is a free competitive analysis tool from HubSpot that gives your agency a quick snapshot of important website metrics, including performance, mobile, SEO, and security metrics.

Your client’s site then gets an overall "grade" based on the cumulative score out of 100 for all the metrics. It's free to check one site, but comparing metrics requires a subscription to CMS Hub Professional. The website is a fun, lightweight tool for sending reports to clients.

Pricing: Free to use

Monitor Hubspot email campaigns, CRM data, and more within one streamlined dashboard. Sign up for AgencyAnalytics to start saving your agency time as you scale. Get your 14-day free trial now.

13. Keyword Discovery

KeywordDiscovery is a powerful keyword research tool that pulls from a database of 36 billion search queries from various search engines around the world.

By pulling data from every search engine, KeywordDiscovery finds keywords that other tools might miss. It goes one step further still, showing your agency which of those keywords drive the most traffic to your client’s competitors.

For example, if a competitor is getting a large amount of traffic from the keyword "best seo tools," but not "seo tools" you should be designing content that targets the longer tail terms.

KeywordDiscovery does most of the heavy lifting, too. The tool tells you exactly which terms to target, based on a variety of traffic and competition metrics.

Pricing: Free version available, Professional starts at $50/month

14. Serpstat

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that includes more than 20 tools, including one for competitor research.

The platform lets you automatically identify your client’s top competitors, view side-by-side comparisons of a domain’s position in organic and paid search results, and discover competing pages with the highest visibility score.

The tool also helps your agency research keywords and compare rankings for up to 200 domains at once with their Batch Analysis Tool.

Pricing: Free to try, then starts at $69/month

15. Google Advanced Search Operators

Google Advanced Search Operators are words and symbols that enhance standard keyword-based search and deliver more relevant search results. By adding a couple of operators to a search, you learn a lot about a competitor's site or marketing strategy.

Using a combination of the "site:" operator and your client’s exact match keyword, you’ll see a competitor's top pages for your client’s target key term. This reveals how difficult it would be to rank for that particular keyword, guiding their keyword & content strategy to focus on keywords that are easier to rank for.

Pricing: Free

16. SpyOnWeb

A common marketing strategy on the web today is the use of microsites for traffic, link bait and lead generation. Want to see what sites your competitors own? Head over to SpyOnWeb.

All you need to do is enter a competitors’ URL and you'll see all the sites that belong to the same owner. This is valuable information for businesses in any niche, but particularly so for businesses with a local, physical presence. Many real estate agents use this strategy, creating microsites for smaller counties and towns to capture new home buyers.

Use SpyOnWeb to see what virtual properties your competition has claimed, and you may gain valuable insights into their marketing strategy.

Pricing: Free to use, then $5.95/month

Read More: Pros & Cons of the Best Keyword Rank Tracker Tools

CONTENT & TRAFFIC ANALYSIS TOOLS

17. BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo is every content marketer's dream. It's a powerful tool for spying on your client’s organic competitors’ top content and modeling their content strategy.

Enter your client’s keyword or competitor URL into the tool, and Buzzsumo will return a list of top content by share count and links.

For example, it shows your agency which specific competing page has the most shares. Knowing that content headline and format performed well, your agency should use that information to create something better (and different) to help clients rank higher on the SERPs.

Then, promote their content to the same people who shared their competitors’ piece and they'll likely share yours too (assuming it's unique and interesting content).

Buzzsumo also comes with a set of helpful tracking tools. Set up content alerts and Buzzsumo will notify you whenever a competitors’ page gets a new share or link. Stay on top of your client's content strategy and immediately reach out to the linker or sharer and request the same for your client’s content.

Pricing: Free to try, then $99/month

18. BuiltWith

BuiltWith is a competitive intelligence tool that helps your agency spy on competitors and even steal their customers.

Use the tool to identify which technology your client’s competitors are using. For example, this tool shows the exact WordPress theme and plugins used by a competitor to help you uncover granular details about what is working well for them.

The BuiltWith Competitor Comparison report reveals incredible data like who's using their products, and which technologies are growing within a particular region or demographic.

Pricing: Free for one-off checks, plans at $295/month

19. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb has grown into a very powerful competitive research tool. It's a popular tool amongst major brands, providing crystal clear data and insight on a variety of important marketing metrics.

Use SimilarWeb to see where competitors are getting their traffic. Social? Organic? Paid? SimilarWeb shows all traffic sources and includes changes over the past few months.

Then, correlate traffic data to historical keyword rankings (also part of the tool), to prioritize marketing campaigns.

If your client’s top competitors rank well for a particular keyword around the same time they acquired a particular backlink, then you know that doing a guest post on the same site is a worthwhile strategy to garner similar results.

Pricing: Free to try, Enterprise pricing available upon request

20. Who's Mailing What

Who’s Mailing What is one of the few competitive intelligence tools that tracks a competitors’ direct mail campaigns.

It's easy to get caught in a digital marketing bubble and forget about more traditional ads: billboards, radio, TV and direct mail. Who's Mailing What helps your agency stay on top of industry trends in each of those areas.

If you see a competitor investing a lot in one of those channels, it may be worth exploring.

Pricing: Free to try, pricing available upon request

21. Internet Archive

The Internet Archive (aka the Wayback Machine) keeps a database of how competitors' websites looked throughout the years. For a walk down memory lane, here's a snapshot of the SEO Moz home page back in 2009.

All fun aside, looking at the history of a competitor's page gives your agency some unique insights. For example, using a traffic tool like Semrush, you’ll find that a specific page had a large traffic spike at some point in the past. Check the Archive to see if any site changes were made around that time. If there were, those same design changes could boost conversions on your client’s website.

Pricing: Free to use

22. Owler

Owler is an industry and competitor analysis tool that lets you track companies in your client’s niche.

The platform offers three core solutions targeted at the following groups: inquisitive people, executives & marketers, and sales professionals.

Each of the solutions gives your agency access to excluding company data on over 13 million public and private companies. Sort and filter through news and events and get alerts when there’s breaking news about a company you’re tracking.

Pricing: Free to try, then starts at $99/year

23. Owletter

With so many new digital marketing platforms available today, it’s easy to forget about email marketing. When used properly, however, email marketing is still an incredibly powerful channel that nearly every brand uses today.

Owletter is a tool that lets you capture, store, and analyze your competitors’ emails.

You simply add your competitors to the platform, and Owletter automatically captures all the emails they send with a screenshot. This allows you to learn and get inspiration from exactly how the competition is using email marketing.

Pricing: 14-day free trial, then starts at $19/month

MONITORING AND MENTIONS TOOLS

24. Google Alerts

Google Alerts saves your agency the trouble of visiting the site to repeatedly perform the same search. Set up an alert and have the latest news about your client’s competitors delivered to your inbox. It monitors news, blogs, video, discussions, books, and more.

Alerts is a simple tool that helps you monitor competitor brand and keyword mentions with additional reporting features. Set up an alert one time and then receive real-time, daily, or weekly email reports in your inbox.

Perfect for budget-conscious agencies, Google Alerts are great for organizing competitive intel on a budget.

Pricing: Free

25. TalkWalker

As social media continues to dominate our digital lives, social listening has become increasingly important for brands. Listening and partaking in the conversation about your client’s brand has amazing benefits (just as tuning out the conversation has dire consequences).

Talkwalker is like Google Alerts on steroids. Like Alerts, the tool monitors keywords and mentions, but it takes things to the next level and listens to digital conversations in more than 187 languages across 12 social networks.

To get started with Talkwalker (it's free) just add in your client’s keywords, brand name, and their content and let Talkwalker handle the rest. The tool shows, in real-time, how people are talking about your client’s brand. Are they excited? Afraid? Angry? Enthusiastic? Talkwalker helps your agency map out the global emotional response (aka "sentiment") to your client’s content.

The implications for competitive research are huge. 

For example, reaching out to angry customers of a competitor with a special offer from your client effectively steals large chunks of a market in a matter of minutes.

Talkwalker also monitors how well-received your client’s competitors' ads are by different demographics. A Talkwalker case study found that Americans respond better to visual ads on Facebook, whereas Europeans were more likely to click text-only ads.

Pricing: Free to try, then $9600/year

26. Mention

Mention is a tool that helps agencies monitor the web. Set up alerts based on keywords or hashtags to know exactly when other sites are talking about your client’s competitors, including everything from simple text mentions to links to tweets.

If a website mentions a competitor (or their product), you may be able to reach out and get a link to your client’s site, without their competitor ever knowing.

Similar to influencer marketing tools like Buzzstream and Ahrefs, Mention sorts brand mentions by influencer/site rating and authority, making it easy to prioritize the top link opportunities.

Pricing: $29/month

PAY PER CLICK (PPC) TOOLS

27. Semrush

Semrush comes with a long list of features, ranging from keyword valuation to SEM insights, to help your clients stay ahead of competitors both in organic and paid rankings.

Semrush is useful for both SEO and PPC competitive intelligence, but particularly effective as a PPC tool. Many advertisers assume that their SEO competitors will also be their main PPC competitors. This is rarely the case. Semrush shows your client’s most relevant PPC competitors, and also, the appropriate keywords to bid on.

For each paid search competitor, Semrush reveals their ad copy, average position, top PPC keywords, search volme, percentage of ad spend per keyword, and total traffic from each keyword. Armed with this information, your agency should adjust your client’s PPC strategy accordingly.

Semrush isn't limited to Google Ads — the tool also reports on Bing and Facebook PPC data. 

Pricing: 7-day free trial, then $99.95/month

Keep track of your client’s backlinks, Trust Score, Domain Score, and more in an intuitive Semrush dashboard. AgencyAnalytics has dozens of Semrush widgets to build fully customizable client reports. Start your 14-day free trial today. 

28. SpyFu

The difference between success and failure in pay-per-click marketing generally comes down to one thing: keyword selection. Choose the right keywords, and you'll make a decent profit for your clients. Choose poorly and you'll be spinning your wheels, wasting time and money on keywords that don't convert.

To identify profitable keywords, use SpyFu. It's a competitive analytics tool specifically for PPC marketers, revealing brands' most profitable keywords (both pay-per-click and organic).

To uncover profitable keywords with SpyFu, enter each of your client’s competitors’ domains and it tells you which keywords are making them the most money. Take a look at their ad copy and landing pages, then replicate their PPC strategies to get similar results for your own clients.

Notably, SpyFu has no keyword export limits and includes up to 7 years of advertising history for each domain and keyword (versus one year of history for Semrush).

Ultimately, it's a matter of personal preference. Both tools are great for spying on competing PPC strategies.

Pricing: $39/month

29. Kantar Media

Formerly called AdGooroo, Kantar is a multifunctional tool that includes a great SEM intelligence tool.

Their “Paid Search Intelligence” tool shows agencies their client’s competitors’ top Google Ads and PLA strategies. Get data on how their competitors are spending their PPC budget, how well their ads are performing, which keywords they're using, their exact ad copy, and even the landing pages for each ad.

What's more, SEM Insight alerts you when your client’s competitor changes their bidding strategy, helping you deliver proactive wins to your clients. 

It's no surprise why agencies love Kantar. Using Paid Search Intelligence, they quickly bring a client up to speed with the top advertisers in the client's industry.

Pricing: Contact to request demo and product details

30. The Search Monitor

The Search Monitor does it all: brand monitoring, trademark use, and competitive analysis across a variety of traffic channels (paid, organic, local, social, and mobile). It even shows how your clients stack up against competitors in Google Shopping.

The Search Monitor is a great tool to protect your client’s brand with PPC bidding strategies. Using a proprietary statistic called "Knock-Out", agencies see when and how their client’s brands are being "hijacked" by their affiliates.

Pricing: $599/month

31. Search Metrics

Like the other PPC CI tools above, the Searchmetrics Paid Competitor Comparison Tool shows competitor keywords, ad copy, and ad spend.

However, it sets itself apart with a unique dashboard that shows both SEO and PPC data, side by side. This provides a dual analysis of keyword data, with both Search Engine Optimization informing Pay Per Click strategies and vice versa.

With the Searchmetrics dashboard, your agency easily compares organic and paid keyword rankings side by side for thousands of competitors, identifying gaps in your client’s competing marketing campaigns. With the powers of SEO and PPC combined, you quickly identify profitable opportunities and use them to your client’s advantage.

Pricing: 89€/month

SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS

32. Sprout Social

Most social media managers have enough on their plate between publishing content and interacting with their audience across all social networks. Who has time to keep track of the competition? Sprout Social does.

Sprout Social is a social analytics platform that aggregates data from all major social networks and organizes it in easy-to-understand reports. The platform includes tools for analytics, engagement, publishing, and social listening.

Every agency benefits from knowing what their client’s competitors are doing on social media. Sprout Social helps you identify trends, tactics, and challenges as you plan your client’s marketing efforts.

Pricing: Free trial, then $99/month

33. Fanpage Karma

This tool gives your agency all sorts of useful information about a Facebook page, from audience engagement to page growth (usually stats only available to the page owner sees).

All you have to do is enter the URL of your client’s competing Facebook page and Fanpage Karma spits out the metrics. The tool also has similar features for YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Whatsapp, which expands your spy operations across the major social networks.

Pricing: 49€/month

34. FollowerWonk

Despite its problems and past claims that it’s a dying channel, Twitter is alive and well. You can either ignore this fact or get with the program and start growing your account. Enter Followerwonk by Moz, a nifty tool for stealing competitors’ Twitter followers and growing your clients’ audience.

Here's a basic process for getting started with 'The Wonk'. First, write down the top 3 influencers in your client’s niche and enter their Twitter handles in Followerwonk.

If any of the influencers follow their competitors, there's a good chance they'll follow your client too. To get on their radar, engage with their tweets, share their content and regularly partake in the Twitter conversation.

To determine who to follow, a simple rule of thumb is to follow the most active Twitter users–the folks with the most Tweets and engagement. Just remember, if your client wants to be part of the Twitter in-crowd then you’ll have to participate for them. Don't be Follow-Unfollow Fred, whose only purpose is there to get followers for the sake of vanity.

If you're regularly following and engaging other people in your client’s niche, they should see results in a matter of weeks.

Pricing: Free to try, then $29/month

35. Phlanx

With a focus on influencer marketing, Phlanx is a social media marketing platform that offers several tools for competitive analysis.

First, their Instagram Engagement Calculator is great to see how active competitors' accounts are, which gives you clues about whether their Instagram strategy is effective or not.

Aside from engagement, the platform also features competitor tracking tools for Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch, with Facebook and TikTok.

Pricing: 30-day free trial, then starting at $35/month

Finding the Best Competitor Analysis Tool for Your Agency

Although there are many analysis tools out there, it can be challenging to determine which one will work best for your agency and the clients you work with. If your agency specializes in a specific service like social media management, testing out a tool like Sprout Social is an obvious choice. However, many agencies offer more than just a single service. 

The best plan of action would be to try one tool for each purpose, for example: 

• Adbeat for ad intelligence 

• Ahrefs for SEO 

• BuzzSumo for content

• Google Alerts for website mentions 

• Semrush for PPC 

• Sprout Social for social media 

• AgencyAnalytics for reporting

You may be thinking that looks like a lot of software to implement, not to mention pay for and monitor regularly. Using a reporting platform like AgencyAnalyitcs helps your team check most of the tools above in one single platform to save your agency tons of time. It also helps you tell a story with your client’s marketing data and visually explain to them all of the efforts you’re taking to keep them ahead of their competitors. 

Build fully customizable client dashboards and reports with complete flexibility and control. Start your 14-day free trial today.

Final Thoughts

If you made it this far, give yourself a pat on the back. Well done.

As helpful as these tools are, your agency doesn’t need all of them to start your covert spy operations. Some tools help you uncover 90% of your client’s competitor secrets. And many of them seamlessly integrate with the AgencyAnalytics platform to save your agency from jumping from platform to platform. 

Connect over 80 marketing channels and automate your reporting with AgencyAnalytics. Start your 14-day free trial today to streamline your agency’s competitor analysis processes. 

If you really want to supercharge your agency’s competitive intel ops, pick one tool from each category and put it to work. That's plenty.

That said, competitive intelligence is a double-edged sword. It's important to know what your client’s competitors are up to — what's working for them and what isn't.

However, the best brands lead by example. Don't get too caught up in chasing the competition or you'll get stuck in me-too marketing mode, leaving little time and energy for innovation and experimentation.

Be sure to bookmark this article as a resource to come back to when testing out new competitor analysis tools.