5 Ways to Automatically Monitor Your Competitors Without Code

In today’s volatile business environment, knowledge is power. The current recipe to success can change rapidly, seemingly overnight. And the brands that succeed are those who can navigate the turbulent waters.

A key part of success is observing your competitors. When you know what you’re up against, it’s easier to identify opportunities and challenges. And with so many businesses online, gathering useful information has never been more accessible. However, manual monitoring can be time-consuming. Automatically collecting data from trusted sources can help you stay up-to-date while focusing on your core business.

Competitive analysis is valuable for business owners, marketing professionals, and entrepreneurs. Thanks to the many tools and services available that don’t require custom development, it’s not always necessary to build a solution from the ground up. In this blog article, we’ll explore a few ideas for analyzing your competitors—all without writing any code.

How to Analyze Your Brand’s Competition Without Code

Keeping your brand relevant in its industry requires collecting the right information regarding competitors. This generally depends on the insights you need and the complexity of analysis. Some key types of information you may want to collect include:

• Product Information. What similar products are there on the market? How are they priced? Where are people buying them? How are they described?
• Customer Sentiment. What are users saying about a product? What are customers saying about a brand? How might different updates to features and marketing change their feelings?
• Marketing Strategies. How are your competitors reaching their customers? How are they positioning their brand messaging and value propositions?
• Talent and Hiring. Who are your competitors hiring to help them succeed? What positions do they see as valuable? How do employees feel about working there?

This information can inform decision-making across various business functions, including product development, marketing, and people ops.

Larger brands might have more advanced analytics requirements and benefit from custom-coded solutions that can be tailored to their specific needs. However, nocode tools are often the better choice for small- to medium-sized businesses that need to quickly and cost-effectively start tracking their competitors’ activities.

If you’re looking for a few relatively easy, code-free ways to start tracking the competition, read on for some ideas!

Monitor Competing SEO Performance

Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SimilarWeb exist to help you gain an edge in terms of search engine optimization. You can use them to perform in-depth analysis, but there are also ways to automatically gather useful information without having to search up your competitors one by one.

Ahrefs, in particular, has several helpful code-free ways to analyze competitor data. Alerts can notify you when competitors gain or lose backlinks, receive a mention, and rank for new keywords.

Another way to access data in Ahrefs is using browser automation tools like Roborabbit. This could allow you to programmatically perform tasks like download overviews, keywords, backlinks, and other data on your competitors as CSV files.

Hare Hint 🐰: If you’re comfortable with some technical setup, Ahrefs offers a public API that allows users to create custom requests to access data such as backlinks, competitor data, and performance metrics.

Extract Product Pricing Data

Services like Comptera and Prisync provide access to up-to-date pricing data across different markets and sales channels. This allows you to ensure your products are competitively priced and provides insight into your competitors’ strategies.

If you only need to track pricing data for a few competitors, web scraping may be a better option. You can build a price scraping bot that extracts the information at your preferred frequency and saves it to a database for analysis. Besides being easy for non-technical users, this method only collects information from a few trusted sources so you only have insights relevant to your needs.

Hare Hint 🐰: You can also use browser automation to collect other types of data, including product details, documents, and links.

Compile Insights In Custom Newsletters

One great way to keep an ear to the ground with the latest industry happenings is to have relevant insights delivered straight to your inbox. You can curate a custom newsletter to include only things that concern the competitive landscape, such as:

• Competitor media mentions
• Industry news
• Analytical insights from your own sources

Do this by setting up a web scraping tool to automatically extract the latest insights from your trusted sources, then use a workflow automation tool like Zapier to compile them into a custom newsletter that can be sent to you at your preferred frequency.

The best thing about automating a personal newsletter is that there are so many possible ways to customize it. You don’t have to limit delivery to email—a Slack inbox, Discord channel, or even Telegram channel can be a great way to receive competitor news.

Track Competing Social Media Performance

Monitoring your competitors’ social media performance is crucial for gauging brand sentiment and staying on top of trends. Tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch provide insights into key metrics that impact your social presence, such as post performance, trending hashtags, post length, followers, and unfollowers.

Social listening, analytics, and benchmarking tools often have alert and automated reporting features that allow you to track competitors’ brand sentiment, customer interactions, and overall performance. By analyzing a combination of these metrics, you can gain a comprehensive view of your competitors' performance, which can then inform your own strategy and help you maintain a competitive edge.

Aggregate Customer Reviews

Customer feedback can be found on manufacturer websites, e-commerce platforms, social media, and review aggregator sites. Some sources—such as Google Reviews—have APIs that you can call to access reviews at high volumes. Other popular sites may also have scrapers built specifically built to extract this data.

Even if you’re looking to aggregate feedback from sites that don’t have pre-built scrapers, robotic process automation (RPA) tools that control browsers can be used to create a custom solution. You can extract review data by product, brand, or manufacturer—whatever best suits your needs. Target a few specific competitors or extract all of the reviews referencing a certain product from an e-commerce platform—it’s up to you!

Information gleaned from reviews can be turned into actionable insights, which can then inform your product roadmap, marketing messaging, and customer experience initiatives.

Hare Hint 🐰: Get more out of your scraping initiatives by automatically extracting your own customer reviews to transform raw feedback into compelling marketing assets.

Conclusion

Today’s business landscape is quick-paced, and staying informed about your competitors is far from a luxury—it’s a necessity. The nocode tools and automation strategies we’ve explored provide powerful ways to gather competitive intelligence even without extensive technical knowledge.

Small- to medium-sized businesses and marketing professionals can use these tools to:

• Gain real-time insights into market trends
• Understand competitor strategies
• Identify potential challenges and opportunities
• Inform strategic decisions

Remember—the goal isn’t just to collect data and stay on top of your competitors, but to transform that information into actionable insights that can drive your business forward. Good luck!