

How do you track your competitors? - laktek

Do you use any app or method to track your competitors' progress? Site traffic, downtimes, media coverage, new features and customer reactions, etc
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tonystubblebine
The only constructive way is through search.twitter.com. A lot of mentions
there are from potential customers looking to make a decision. Having that
information often lets us insert ourselves into the discussion.

All the other stuff is just a total time waste and way to make yourself
unhappy. I'm trying to train myself to just think about my own business and
customers.

I remember when I was at Odeo, a podcasting startup, we'd hear about all of
these startup competitors and I'd get sort of worried. When the company
switched to Twitter, Odeo was left un-updated for an entire year (it now has
new and active owners). At the end of that year, Time voted Odeo a top-50
website and I can't even remember the names of the competitors.

My take away is that competition is either much less important than your own
execution or so massively disruptive that you don't need to track them. In
Odeo's case, itunes was that big of a disruption and was the major reason we
were experimenting with side projects (like Twitter).

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quellhorst
I manually visit their sites and sometimes setup google alerts on their
company name.

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ordinaryman
I used to use google alerts initially. But now I have switched to subscribing
to the feeds from news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com for custom search
queries, along with subscribing to competitors' blogs and forums. This should
cover _media coverage, new features and customer reactions_.

I do not monitor for downtimes specifically, as any major downtime will anyway
come up in the news/blogs.

But if you are very much interested you may sign up for website monitoring
tools like site24x7.com (has a free version) or pingdom.com (no free version)
and monitor their downtime too. Some of these tools check for web content
changes too. You can use it to track changes made to specific pages of your
competitors' website.

I hope you track references to your product/service too, as you need to
respond quickly to customer reactions, both positive (with at least a thanks)
and negative (apologize and fix the problem).

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mattjung
There is a nice tool named www.competitious.com that may help you doing it.

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d00723
as noted, google alerts, twitter,

worth mentioning and used daily: compete,

tools: page rank checker, back link analyzer, paid link analyzer, supplemental
index ratio analyzer

