15 eCommerce Competitor Analysis Tools to Check up on Your Competitors

“It’s not easy to operate a business, especially when you’re worried about the guy down the street taking customers away from you.” – Neil Patel

eCommerce is rife with competition. An eCommerce agency here, an agency there, agencies everywhere. In fact, there are between 12 and 24 million eCommerce sites across the world today.

And just when you think you have a good lay of the land, another one pops up and starts creating ripples on your previously calm(ish) pond.

It’s not all bad, though. With so many competitors surrounding you, you have a prime opportunity on your hands: eCommerce competitor analysis.

Competitive analysis of eCommerce sites is what you should do both before starting a business and while running it. It helps you learn more about your competitors — their strategies, their social footprint, their keywords, everything — and what you can do to either catch up to them and beat them, or widen that gap and keep beating them.

Regarding how to research your competition, you can start with the following 15 tools.

What is a website competitor analysis tool? Why are they important?

Before we reveal how to check website competitors with the best ecommerce competitive analysis tools, let’s discuss what these tools are and why they are vital.

A competitor analysis tool will help you to track, learn, and assess the strategies of your competition. You can then use this information to enhance your own marketing campaigns. After all, to do better than the competition, you need to understand what they are doing.

Competitor analysis tools are critical because they give you the power to improve your own business strategy, taking away customers from the competition.

15 Competitor research tools

Now that you know why it is important to use an ecommerce competitor analysis tool, we are going to reveal 15 of the best below:

1: SpyFu

SpyFu exposes the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors.

SpyFu is one of the best competitor research tools out there.

Whether you want to focus on PPC, SEO or keyword research, SpyFu has MANY tools you can use. For example, you can search for competitors and look over their keywords and ads:

• AdWords competitor keyword spy tool
• Monitor PPC competitors
• Find competitors’ keywords you don’t already buy
• Etc.

You can also look deeper into their content, keywords and backlinks:

• Research competitor’s SEO keywords
• 3-way competitor keyword research tool
• Check competitor backlinks by keyword
• Etc.

And go even deeper into their keywords:

• Quality backlinks for specific keywords
• PPC and SEO SERP analysis
• SEO keyword ranking history
• Etc. 

2: Sprout Social

Social media management made easy.

As you can see from their tagline, Sprout Social specialises in social media.

It gives you insights into competitors’ messages, content, social presence and more, and goes beyond by giving you real-time social monitoring

You also have a Facebook Competitors report that compares your own growth with that of your competition’s by breaking down your Page impressions, measuring fan growth, identifying your best content, and providing customisable reports that make Facebook analytics digestible and ready to present.

3: SEMrush

All-in-one Marketing Toolkit for digital marketing professionals.

As an all-in-one marketing tool, SEMrush helps you with SEO, paid traffic and social media.

With SEO, you have a technical SEO audit, a backlink audit with analytics, competitive intelligence and position tracking.

Paid traffic gives you an analysis of your competition, as well as ad keywords and creatives research and strategy analysis.

As for social media, you can discover best-performing posts, compare how you’re performing against your competitors, and get instant insights into your social strategy.

More on the competitor analysis side, you have:

• A domain overview that gives you a bird’s-eye into a competitor’s online presence
• Traffic analytics that identify your competitors’ main traffic sources
• Benchmarks to compare competitors against each other
• An overview of your competitors in organic search results
• An in-depth analysis of competitor backlinks
• A lot more

4: BuzzSumo

Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.

Like its name states, BuzzSumo centers around what’s ‘buzzing’ online.

To make sure your strategies are as informed as possible, it doesn’t only show you content from your competitors, but also top-performing content from topics that are relevant to your brand.

More on the competitor research side, BuzzSumo shows you:

• Your competition’s most shared content
• Who has been sharing your competition’s content
• Alerts when a competitor publishes something
• Detailed competitor content performance reports
• A lot more

5: MozBar

Your free all-in-one SEO toolbar for research on the go.

MozBar is slightly different than the other tools in this list in that it’s more of an “SEO toolbar” that gives you instant metrics while phentermine med viewing any page or SERP.

That being said, the MozBar extension is a must because it shows you how much of an authority (in Google’s eyes) your competitors are.

How?

By showing you both their domain authority and page authority score.

Apart from these link metrics, it also offers a page analysis to explore on-page elements and general attributes, and the ability to find and highlight keywords on a page and separate them by type (followed, no-followed, external or internal).

6: Ahrefs

Ahrefs helps you to learn why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them.

Ahrefs is a tool that provides you with more tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche.

For example, it gives you an organic search report where you can see the keywords your competitors are ranking for and how traffic they’re bringing them.

Like BuzzSumo, it also gives you a look into their top performing content, and provides other tools that fall into the following categories:

• Competitive analysis
• Keyword research
• Backlink research
• Content research
• Rank tracking
• Web monitoring

7: SimilarWeb

Market intelligence solutions to see all your competitors’ traffic.

SimilarWeb is a tool that helps you in many ways. For example, apart from helping you check up on your competitors, it helps you:

• Track your market share
• Make the right strategic decisions
• Optimise your digital effectiveness
• Discover trends as they happen
• Win your market

With that in mind, SimilarWeb provides benchmarks against your competitors and industry as a whole so you have something to work toward, and even reveals your competition’s analytics and online strategy.

It also shows you a website’s referral traffic, what their site visitors were searching for and other similar sites they browsed so you have an overarching picture of their brand.

8: Feedly

Be in the know. Keep up with all the topics that matter to you. All in one place.

Feedly is a creative agency favorite you can use to keep up to date with your competitors’ content by gathering their publications, blogs, Tweets, YouTube videos, etc. in an easy to read and manage feed.

As an added extra, it can also integrate into Sprout Social!

9: MailCharts

MailCharts saves you the trouble of secretly subscribing to your competition’s emails and spending hours trying to find something actionable.

As we close, we’ll focus on two tools that specialise in email research.

The first, MailCharts, pretty much does everything for you.

For starters, as with many of these tools, you can track and report on competitors. Even better, you can also see a competitor’s email calendar so you can plan against it and improve your campaigns.

You can also compare your own campaigns with their database of marketing emails, which serves to give you a list of email best practices like timing, frequency and subject line length to ensure your campaigns are well optimised.

10: Owletter

Owletter captures, stores & analyses your competitor’s emails.

Finally, the last tool we’ll cover today — and the second that covers email — is Owletter.

Owletter automatically captures, takes a screenshot, stores and analyses every single email a competitor sends so you can learn from them and, with that information, beat them.

It creates a dashboard with those emails, which serves to break things down into sections, such as how many emails were sent and the days and hours they were sent, and sends you summaries detailing the emails you’ve ‘received’ in the past month.

11: Google AdWords Keyword Planner

The Google AdWords Keyword Planner has been designed to help you locate new keywords, as the name indicates. You can assess the websites of your competitors, as well as scour the web, for keywords best related to your target market and business. This is an excellent tool for ensuring you are up to date with all of the latest keyword trends.

12: WooRank

WooRank is a digital marketing tool and SEO checker. It will scan a site, giving you a comprehensive audit of its SEO. While a lot of people use this for their own websites, you can actually use this for competitor websites as well. You can add up to three different competitors, and the elements you can compare are as follows:

• Social media engagement
• Backlink quality
• Keyword usage
• Site usability and performance
• Technical SEO

13: BuiltWith

Described as competitive analysis and business intelligence tool, BuiltWith gives you profiles of business intelligence, sales, lead generation, and websites. It’s a very comprehensive and effective tool.

Using BuiltWith gives you the power to determine some of the main market segments your brand could be missing out on. Build a list of prospects by tracking your competitors.

14: Wappalyzer

This is one of the most fascinating tools for competitor analysis on the market today because of the nature in which it operates. It runs as an add-on to Firefox, and it only does one thing, however, it does this one thing, very, very well.

It basically reveals the different types of technology that are running on a website, for example, software, plug-ins, and so on. So, if you can see something you like on another website, Wappalyzer will tell you how it ended up there so you can do this for your own site.

15: Quick Search

Last but not least, Quick Search provides you with an instant overview of any sort of online brand. It will present you with forum comments, blogs, news sites, and social media network coverage. You will be able to monitor conversations about your brand, your competitors, and anything else going on in your business.

If that is not enough, you can enter a number of different brands at once to compare sentiment, with an impressive accuracy rating of 90 per cent.

Let’s Take a Second Look

As you can see, within the realm of eCommerce, there are many competitor analysis tools marketing teams can make use of.

Let’s take a second look at the ones we covered today:

1. SpyFu
2. Sprout Social
3. SEMrush
4. BuzzSumo
5. MozBar
6. Ahrefs
7. SimilarWeb
8. Feedly
9. MailCharts
10. Owletter
11. Google AdWords Keyword Planner
12. WooRank
13. BuiltWith
14. Wappalyzer
15. Quick Search