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A Competitor Analysis system is a component of marketing strategy for managing all crucial aspects of the business landscape such as about the business competitors and the various activities they involve in. These activities include product pricing, product development, events, launches and more.
In short, competitor monitoring and analysis adds value at many levels. It offers better awareness and information about the potential threats and allow you to retain your existing customers and create new ones too.
Businesses need a good amount of data made available at the right time from the most appropriate sources. This complex objective can be met with the help of web scraping. With this technique, important data from the competitor’s website can be fetched to audit the competition.
This is done in order to make it easy for the business to understand which data is of more importance as compared to the staggeringly massive pool of data that’s available out there. Before getting into monitoring and data extraction, there should be a clearly defined set of signals to be monitored. Here are the important competition signals you should be tracking for a comprehensive competitor monitoring system.
Key competition signals to monitor:
1. Audit the competitor’s SEO strategy
Auditing the competitor’s SEO strategy will help you figure out the popular keywords that they are using and also the backlinks and the landing pages that are performing well for them. You can then analyse which ones are working and which ones aren’t. This way you can learn from the competitor’s success and frame a stronger SEO campaign with the right set of keywords. You can also come to know which poorly performing keywords you need to stay away from.
3. Review competitor’s PPC Spend
The best way to budget your PPC campaign is to take an insight into the budget spent on your rival’s PPC campaigns. With this, you can uncover the most profitable keywords and the ads that run on Adwords.
You can also view the ad variations of your competitors over the last few years and strategize your business’ PPC spend. This lets you fix the budget and ad spend on chosen few keywords that have the highest potential to deliver immense yields in the form of clicks and impressions.
4. Monitor your competitor’s product pricing
Web scraping services helps you get in-depth insights of your competitor’s product pricing. To better understand the competition and have an edge over them, it is important to stay updated with the real-time product pricing of your competitors.
This can be done to get instantly updated information about what your competitors’ pricing is and when they are updating the pricing. So in this way, you can ensure you have a profitable edge over your competitor by running sales or by introducing new competitive pricing. When you have a properly optimized price put up, the chances of sales happening on your site shoots up as the product is priced just right.
5. Watch your competitors’ product catalogs
One of the best ways to stay updated on the e-commerce marketplace is through auditing your competitor’s product catalogs. Web scraping allows your business to crawl through all your competitor’s product lines to understand the trends and similarities.
Based on these similarities and which product is gaining more popularity, you can categorize your products. By achieving real-time pricing of your competitor and their wholesalers, you can attract your potential customers. Always make sure, the products that you keep are relevant and timely, and the prices are impressive and budget-friendly.
6. Competitor reviews from third party websites
Before a customer purchases an item online, he/she goes through the reviews and comments that the product has received from the audience. This type of research from the customer’s end ensures that they end up buying trusted and quality products.
Take a look at your competitor’s reviews and comments gathered from third party websites to find out the likes and dislikes of the customers. This can be quite advantageous for your business as web scraping lets you find out the best points and also loopholes of your competitors’ product line-up.
So, if there is a product that has received 5-star ratings and great reviews from a large number of buyers, then it makes total sense to improve its visibility on your online retail marketplace.
Even though you have scraped enough information about your Competitor Analysis from the above-mentioned points, you really cannot forget social media. People nowadays spend a good share of their time browsing through social media pages. This is one of the reasons why every business, be it small, mid-sized or large now has a social media presence.
To strategically use this presence in your advantage, web scraping should be used to understand the type of engagement, sales promotion, and interaction that your competitors are dealing with. In order to reap the extra benefit, crawl through their target audience; take a look at the number and type of posts that they post for engagement.
8. Keep track of competitor’s funding information
Web scraping allows you to find out whether your competitor is deriving merit on their own capability or has a funding capital to support them. This can be facilitated by monitoring business and tech blogs for keywords associated with your competitors’ brand. This allows you to understand the type of funding they have received, how much they have received and what stage of funding it might be in. To gain the top position in the marketplace, you can get hold of those investors to pitch your business’ products.
To wrap up
Competitor Analysis and monitor is a driving force that allows the business to work towards a path of excellence and success. Such a system is quite essential to understand the competition well and take advantage of the competitor’s moves. With this helpful data, you can plan your campaign around price, promotion, product reviews or even pitch your business to the same set of external investors. You can analyse the strength and weakness of the competition and then frame appropriate strategies to boost your own business. And web scraping can certainly help you in this regard to a great extent.
