Right now, it’s likely your biggest competitor knows more about your website traffic than you do. They know what keywords you are buying, how much you’re spending, how you re-marketing them, and likely have access to several years of your historical campaign data.
It’s not traditional corporate spying, but this is the new age of business intelligence.
Leading platforms now monitor more than 7 billion of results across 109 million domains, effectively creating a vast surveillance machine that is changing how organizations make strategic decisions.
This is systematic, sophisticated, and surprisingly cheap. The same level of competency that required an enterprise budget and a specialized team only a few years ago is now open to anyone willing to spend less than what most organizations pay for their monthly coffee service.
What you’re about to learn is how a competitor analysis tool works, why businesses are spending big money to spy on their competitors, and what it means for your average company trying to compete in today’s marketplace.
Your Competitors Can Even Tell What You Had For Breakfast (Online)
The depth of what companies can track about each other is bordering on pure absurdity. Today, competitor analysis tools have capabilities to track up to 25 competitor websites at one time – tracking things like the total number of visits for months and the exact percentage of traffic coming from mobile versus desktop.
But here’s where it gets interesting, and a little creepy.
These tools do not just monitor what competing companies are currently doing, but they can record what those companies are doing from almost decades worth of historical records. The primary tools offer access to Google Ads campaign data from the past decade for any competitor. This means every keyword you’ve ever bid on, every ad you’ve ever tried, and every budget you’ve adjusted are all available, indexed, and searchable.
The tracking doesn’t even stop at search. Companies are tracking social media engagement rates, follower growth patterns, their content performance, and even the timing of significant website updates. Some tools can even tell you when a competitor changes their pricing or runs new ads, sometimes within hours.
Brands like Samsung, Deloitte, and Shopify are using these tools, which tells us this is not strictly about small businesses gaining the upper hand. Businesses at the enterprise level have adopted competitor spying as a formal part of their strategic planning.
The data is continuously being collected—major platforms run continuously across 2.5 million search engine results every minute. That is the timeframe we are looking at here.
Why Companies Spend Money to Spy
The investment companies are making to competitor intelligence shows that the value of this intelligence has increased. They charge in the neighborhood of $139.95 – $499.95 per month for the core plan, while other tools start at $59 per month. For most companies, these are not insignificant expenses, and many companies subscribe to multiple platforms at the same time.
Here is what’s worth that investment: The competitive intelligence is instantly actionable and quantifiable. Organizations take advantage of competitor information for many important applications:
– Identifying market trends and preferences of consumers
– Benchmarking against the competition
– Allocating resources where a competitor is weak
– Developing better marketing strategies by monitoring rivals
The time-depth that has become available via these analytics changes the way organizations conduct market research. Instead of speculating about what strategies are effective, they can review years of performance data from competitors to spot patterns and opportunities. Organizations can see what keywords their competitors have let go, what advertising campaigns were most successful, and where they were vulnerable in market coverage.
Perhaps more importantly, this intelligence enables organizations to avoid making costly errors. By studying the failures of competitors—campaigns that were swiftly abandoned, keywords that did not perform well, or marketing strategies that failed to gain traction—organizations can eliminate the expensive trials and errors associated with developing their own strategy.
The investment in intelligence is more easily justified if you consider the alternative of making strategic decisions based on partial information in an increasingly competitive environment.
When Crisis Intelligence Becomes Your Next Business Spy
The latest generation of competitor intelligence tools have moved beyond simple data collection and have become predictive intelligence tools. AI-driven systems now detect when competitors make a major advertising or marketing change, including price increases, often in real-time. This is huge leap from the historical method of reporting monthly.Instead of learning about the actions of competitors weeks after the fact, businesses can, nowadays, respond to these changes days or hours after the fact.
The integration of AI goes beyond speed as well. In addition to speed, AI uses machine learning to capture patterns of competitor action that human analysts would normally miss. In some cases, AI can anticipate when a competitor is getting ready to launch a product, just by looking at hiring patterns, website edits, and changing keywords in their advertising.
The Costless Corporate Espionage of Competitor Intelligence
While the systematic methodology of analyzing a competitor’s behavior is a technological advancement, the biggest shift in competitor intelligence is economic. The tools that used to only exist at the enterprise level are available today, to any small business or individual entrepreneur. A rogue, professional-level tool averages $79 a month, allowing a suite of market research intelligence tools to even companies that couldn’t afford a market research team a few years ago.
This access to the spectrum of competitor intelligence has recently leveled the playing field for competitive analysis, as well. For example, if a small e-commerce business wants to know how the largest competitors manage their keyword strategy for their PPC campaigns, that small e-commerce business can examine the keywords utilized and the amount spent by their competitor.
The implications do not stop with an individual or company’s competitive advantage. As comprehensive competitor intelligence becomes much more accessible to a broad audience, market dynamics and competitive pressure will ultimately accelerate throughout entire industries, as ample opportunity for competitive sustainable advantages to base strategy off of evaporates. Companies may no longer operate under an information asymmetry if they are trying to establish market share from an incumbent company; for example, if a competitor is doing something interesting, another competitor will notice that they are doing something different with time.
The New Normal Is Here
We have crossed a critical point where competitor surveillance is standard practice for all businesses rather than corporate espionage. The combination of low barriers for a company or an individual to perform surveillance in a timely manner on competitors using either technology or monitoring, has made competitor surveillance research and action a real level of market knowledge available to any size business.
The data clearly supports this notion, as there are millions of domains being surveilled, large brands adopting varying forms of enterprise usage, and more tools developing around specific segments of competitor intelligence, than previously and at a lower cost.
What is happening now is not about tools or technologies—it is about a shift in practice in which companies determine competitive intent and prospect intent, intently. At the end of the day, companies who pursue a systematic approach to competitor intelligence are an arm’s length ahead of others in market positioning, resource allocation, and strategic planning.
Now, it is not a matter of if it progresses, it is a matter of the speed of technology adoption for a company to operate competitively in a market where competitor intelligence is comprehensive and accessible.
About the Author
