Think you know your competitors well enough to stay ahead? Most companies don’t realize just how much valuable data they’re missing out on.
Without the right competitor tracking software, you could be making decisions based on guesswork rather than insight.
If you want your brand to thrive, you need to keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing.
Imagine being able to anticipate trends, adjust your strategy on the fly, and make data-driven decisions that give you a competitive edge.
Sounds like a dream? It’s possible with the right competitor tracking software.
Businesses that effectively monitor their competition uncover valuable insights about market trends, audience behavior, and the success of various marketing campaigns.
But with so many options, it can be hard to know which tools will actually make a difference for your brand.
That’s where we come in to simplify things for you. We've rounded up the seven best competitor tracking software to help your company grow smarter.
From all-in-one platforms like Panoramata to niche tools like SparkToro and Brand24, these software options are designed to track everything from social media buzz to keyword performance.
No matter the type of competitor data you’re seeking, there’s something here that can give you an edge.
Ready to dive in? Let’s explore how each of these tools can transform your marketing strategy and elevate your brand.
The Top 6 Competitor Tracking Software, Reviewed
Panoramata - Best for all-in-one tracking and benchmarking
Panoramata doesn’t just supply you with data and figures about your competitor’s performance and activity. It does so automatically, taking the hard work out of your hands, and supplies you with insights that will guide you in concrete terms.
All the competitor data it collects is fed in real time to your dashboard. You can follow all your competitors to get instant updates and summaries about their emails, ads, landing pages, SMS, and websites.
You can also access historical data of your competitor’s activity. For example, if you need to view their Black Friday email campaigns from the previous year, you can look it up on Panoramata. Did I mention our database is fully searchable?
Businesses that effectively monitor their competition uncover valuable insights about market trends, audience behavior, and the success of various marketing campaigns.
You can look up companies, keywords, industries, and even copywriting hooks. Plus, you can use or create or use automatically-generated benchmarks that allow you to compare multiple brands in one place and see if your performance is up to snuff with your industry peers.
And that’s just scratching the surface! You can track content calendars, product launches, pricing changes, email flows, tech stack, and website changes, too.
The possibilities are endless, which is why we highly recommend Panoramata to any brand who wants to make better decisions and improve their strategy.
Similarweb - Best for competitor traffic analysis
Similarweb is a highly popular competitor tracking software that is made for analyzing website traffic, audience behavior, and referral sources.
If you want to see how much traffic your competitor’s website receives, Similarweb is your friend. It also delves into the nitty-gritty details such as traffic sources (paid, organic, social media, referrals) and engagement metrics like visit duration and bounce rates.
Another useful feature is its insights into visitor demographics and behavior. You can see where your competitor’s audience is coming from and their browsing habits.
Similarweb also gives you a look into what websites are referring to your competitor’s website and what keywords are generating their traffic. This can inform your keyword research, SEO efforts, and benchmarking.
A disadvantage of Similarweb is its data collection on small sites as it focuses on websites that receive high traffic. If you’re a niche business with niche competitors, you’re out of luck. It also comes at a relatively higher cost ($125/month), which can strain a small business’ budget.
Lastly, it’s hard to compare long–term data on Similarweb as it uses a week-by-week format to present its insights.
Semrush - Best for SEO analysis
Semrush is a go-to software for businesses interested in tracking their competitor’s content marketing, SEO, PPC, and social media strategies. It excels in keyword research features, allowing you to identify the keywords that matter for your business.
You can peek at your competitor’s organic and paid strategies and identify their high-value keywords. This makes Semrush an excellent choice for brands who want to boost their search visibility and refine their keyword research and technical SEO practices.
However, you can do much more than that with Semrush as it has over 50 digital marketing tools packed in a single platform. You can run a scan of your website’s health, improve your backlink profile, and track the progress of your efforts.
A downside is its high cost (from $139.95/month), although it does have a free trial available. It gets worse though as each tier of its pricing plan offers only one seat, so if you want more than one member of your team to use Semrush, you have to shell out more (at least $45 more per month).
And if you want to unlock the full extent of its competitor tracking features, you have to pay additional on top of those costs, too–just something to consider before you decide to start using this platform.
Google Trends - Best for trendspotting
The premise of Google Trends is simple: to show how many times people have looked up a search term on Google and YouTube. You can look up any keyword or search term on Google Trends and it will show you how popular it is in a selected region.
You can also adjust the timeframe of the search term to your desired period (for example, searches for the term “tote bags” in the previous year).
Google Trends is a useful software for competitor tracking because it can monitor the popularity of your competitor on search. You can check how much traffic your competitor gets and if there’s a recent uptick in volume so you can explore why it happened.
Simply enter your competitor or competitors’ names on Google Trends and see how many times it has been searched and where and where it has been searched. The “when” in particular is very helpful when you are planning your promotions for the year.
If you see interest spikes at the same time each year for your competitors, you can align your promotions accordingly to coincide with those periods.
You can also compare multiple competitors on one page and find related queries and topics to uncover more insights about audience interests.
Best of all, Google Trends is free and easy to use and collects data in real time. It has a few limitations such as only tracking relative search interest, meaning the numbers don’t reflect how many times the term has actually been searched.
It also doesn’t account for search intent. A very popular search term can have multiple meanings and therefore multiple search intents. For example, Google Trends does not know what a searcher looking up “apple” wants to find, whether it’s the fruit or the tech company.
Brand24 - Best for mentions tracking
Are you less concerned about web traffic or search rankings and more interested in how your competitors are perceived online? If so, Brand24 is a great competitor tracking software to consider.
Brand24 is a social listening platform that tracks online mentions of a brand across multiple sites such as social media networks, blogs, videos, forums, and news sites.
Aside from that, you can track your competitor’s activities, campaigns, and interactions. You can see who is talking about your competitors online and set up alerts so you’re notified when your competitors are mentioned.
You can also use Brand24 for benchmarking and compare yourself against your competitors for metrics like share of voice, reach, engagement, and user-generated content.
It also conducts sentiment analysis on your competitors and automatically flags mentions as positive, negative, or neutral. Brand24 gathers competitor data in real time and can also analyze spikes in their mentions and reach.
Brand24 is also a great competitor identification tool since it can track industry-related keywords, thus allowing you to sift through them to find brands that use those keywords.
Overall, it’s an amazing social listening tool but if you want a comprehensive competitor tracking platform, it will fall short. It focuses on one thing and does it very well, which for the right business can be just what they need.
SparkToro - Best for audience research
SparkToro gets you up close and personal about your competitor’s audience and what makes them tick.
Through this software, you can answer important questions about your prospective customers, like:
- What podcasts do they listen to?
- What newsletters have they signed up for?
- What do they look up on search engines?
- What websites do they visit?
- What are their demographics?
Knowing your audience is essential to crafting great campaigns that will resonate with them. SparkToro is a tool you can use to make more engaging copy and effective funnels. It will let you learn the language you need to use to speak to your audience so they feel seen.
More concretely, you can use insights from SparkToro to create better ads and content, and even find sponsorship ideas through podcasts they listen to.
If you don’t know which networks you should put your ads on, what hobbies and interests your ideal customer dabbles in, or if you’re starting from scratch with zero followers, you need SparkToro.
That said, the demographic and location filters on SparkToro leave a lot to be desired, especially when using the audience comparison feature. If you have a smaller business, the cost-to-value ratio can be diminishing, especially if you don’t take advantage of the platform’s full capabilities.
Track your competitors with cutting-edge software
We hope this list gives you a peek into the features of each software and who they’re best suited for.
If you want to track multiple competitors across multiple platforms, consider signing up for Panoramata. It monitors emails, ads, landing pages, SMS, and more in real-time and has a searchable database of more than 3M assets.
Benchmark your performance, track activity, and find creative inspiration you can share with your team all in one place. Try it out for free today and see for yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why is competitor tracking important for my business?
Competitor tracking provides insights into market trends, customer preferences, and what strategies are working for other brands. It helps you make smarter, data-driven decisions that keep your business competitive and aligned with industry changes.
2. How do I choose the best competitor tracking software for my needs?
Choose a tool based on your goals—whether that’s tracking keywords, social media trends, or content performance. Look for software that offers the specific features you need and integrates easily with your current tools. For all-in-one competitor monitoring and benchmarking, try Panoramata, which tracks emails, ads, landing pages, SMS, website changes, and more in real time
3. Can competitor tracking software really improve my marketing strategy?
Yes, competitor tracking software offers data that can guide your marketing decisions, helping you refine campaigns and capitalize on new opportunities. By understanding what works for your competitors, you can adjust your strategy to boost your own results.
