Doing research – how does your company monitor competitors activity? • Hacker News Board

Doing research – how does your company monitor competitors activity?

#1

Post by npamart » Tue, Nov 08, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

Hi everyone, I am working on a project to make competitor monitoring deeper and more efficient. Is anyone here willing to share how their company monitors what similar companies are doing in terms of new features, pricing, marketing activity, hiring, fundraising?

I’m keen to learn about if and how your company monitors competitors activity. What data would you track, what tool would you use, what is doing manually vs automated?

Re: Doing research – how does your company monitor competitors activity?

#2

Post by huijzer » Tue, Nov 08, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

I'm not in business nor am I monitoring competitors, but https://www.similarweb.com/ does appear very nice for these kinds of things. I would summarize their service as having analytics for competitor's sites. From my personal comparisons against my own analytics, Similarweb is surprisingly accurate.

Re: Doing research – how does your company monitor competitors activity?

#3

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Nov 08, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

huijzer wrote: post #2

I'm not in business nor am I monitoring competitors, but https://www.similarweb.com/ does appear very nice for these kinds of things. I would summarize their service as having analytics for competitor's sites. From my personal comparisons against my own analytics, Similarweb is surprisingly accurate.

Similarweb runs into the classic problem of similarity search of balancing popularity with similarity. For instance, for this site

the #1 site is stackoverflow.com which is driven not because it is very similar but because it is really popular (an awful number of people who visited that site also visited stackoverflow but that doesn't mean they are related)

Re: Doing research – how does your company monitor competitors activity?

#4

Post by huijzer » Tue, Nov 08, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #3

huijzer wrote: post #2

I'm not in business nor am I monitoring competitors, but https://www.similarweb.com/ does appear very nice for these kinds of things. I would summarize their service as having analytics for competitor's sites. From my personal comparisons against my own analytics, Similarweb is surprisingly accurate.

Similarweb runs into the classic problem of similarity search of balancing popularity with similarity. For instance, for this site https://www.similarweb.com/website/web3isgoinggreat.com/#ove... the #1 site is stackoverflow.com which is driven not because it is very similar but because it is really popular (an awful number of people who visited that site also visited stackoverflow but that doesn't mean they are relat…

I meant that if you know your competitors already, then you can look up sort of "hidden" information with it