In the eternal battle for market dominance, speed kills. According to a study by Crayon, 78% of businesses say competitive intelligence is "important or very important to their success." However, over half admit struggling to gather intel in a timely and efficient manner.
The fact is, your competitors aren‘t operating in a vacuum. Every day, they‘re shipping new features, testing new messaging, and making strategic moves to eat your lunch. If you‘re not constantly monitoring their activities, you‘re giving them a massive head start.
That‘s why competitive analysis is a core practice for leading companies across all industries. Research shows that businesses who adopt a formal competitor tracking process report:
- 55% faster decision making
- 48% more productive sales teams
- 33% higher customer retention rates
Traditionally, though, competitive analysis has been a tedious and time-consuming exercise. It often involves manually scouring dozens of websites, social media feeds, press releases, and analyst reports to surface relevant intel. This piecemeal approach is not only inefficient, but leaves gaps that savvy competitors can exploit.
Fortunately, the rise of no-code tools has made it easier than ever to automate competitor tracking at scale. By offloading manual data gathering to bots, you can unearth insights faster and refocus your energy on strategic initiatives that directly impact the bottom line.
Two platforms leading this charge are ScrapingBee and Integromat. ScrapingBee is a powerful web scraping API that extracts clean, structured data from any webpage. Integromat is a code-free automation tool that connects ScrapingBee to your go-to business apps. Together, they form a potent competitive intelligence engine.
In this guide, I‘ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we built an automated competitor monitoring system using ScrapingBee and Integromat. I‘ll walk you through the entire process and share battle-tested tips to help you adapt these techniques to your own industry.
But first, let‘s examine the key areas of competitor activity you should be tracking.
What Competitor Metrics Should You Monitor?
While every business has different competitive priorities, here are some of the most common and impactful data points to track:
Pricing & Packaging
Is your biggest rival gearing up for a price war? According to a Bain & Company study, a 1% improvement in pricing can boost profits by over 11%. Monitoring competitors‘ pricing moves is essential to protecting your margins.
Example metrics:
- Price points for key products/services
- Pricing model (one-time, subscription, usage-based, etc.)
- Discounting & promotions
- Bundling & packaging changes
Product Launches & Updates
Falling behind on product innovation is a recipe for disruption. In a 2022 survey, 51% of product management professionals said competitive factors have "a lot of impact" on product development decisions.
Example metrics:
- New feature announcements
- Product line expansions or sunsetting
- Changes to product specs, compatibility, or requirements
- UI/UX updates
Content Marketing
From blog posts to whitepapers to infographics, your rivals are vying for your audience‘s attention. Tracking competitors‘ content output helps you spot gaps in your own editorial and identify trending topics.
Example metrics:
- Blog post frequency and topics
- Content types and formats
- SEO performance (rankings, backlinks, etc.)
- Social media engagement
Customers & Reviews
What are people saying about your competitors online? According to BrightLocal, 77% of consumers "always" or "regularly" read reviews when browsing for local businesses. Monitoring competitor reviews can surface opportunities to one-up your rivals.
Example metrics:
- Review volume, sentiment & star rating
- Frequently mentioned pros, cons and feature requests
- Competitor responses to reviews
- Social media conversations and brand mentions
Hiring & Organizational Changes
Is your rival making a strategic pivot? Tracking hiring patterns and leadership changes can give you a read on their underlying strategy and resource allocation.
Example metrics:
- Job postings by department and seniority
- Employee headcount growth over time
- Executive hires, promotions and departures
- Acquisitions and partnerships
This is by no means an exhaustive list. The specific metrics you track will depend on the competitive dynamics in your industry. The key is to focus on the data points that will help you make better decisions and drive meaningful results.
Now that we know what to track, let‘s dive into how to automate data collection with ScrapingBee and Integromat.
Building Your Competitor Monitoring Machine
At a high level, our automated tracking system involves four steps:
- Identifying target pages and data points to monitor
- Configuring ScrapingBee to extract the desired data
- Setting up Integromat to run extractions on a set schedule
- Piping extracted data into notifications, reports and apps
In this section, I‘ll walk you through each step in detail. We‘ll use a fictional e-commerce company as our case study, but you can adapt this framework to any industry.
Step 1: Create Your "Watchlist"
Start by listing out all the competitors you want to monitor along with the specific pages and data points you‘re interested in. This will form the foundation of your tracking system.
For our hypothetical e-commerce company, the watchlist might look something like this:
A few tips for building out your watchlist:
- Focus on your most direct competitors first, then expand to adjacent players
- Prioritize pages that contain your target data points (e.g. product, pricing pages)
- Note the cadence at which you want to check each page (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.)
Once you have your list, it‘s time to translate those target data points into ScrapingBee commands.
Step 2: Configure Your ScrapingBee Extractions
For each item on your watchlist, you‘ll need to specify the exact data points you want to extract from the page. ScrapingBee makes this easy with its point-and-click extraction builder.
To get started, install the ScrapingBee Chrome extension and navigate to the first target page. Activate the extension, then hover over the desired element and click to add it:
Behind the scenes, ScrapingBee will generate the corresponding CSS selector for that element. For example, if we wanted to extract a competitor‘s product price, the selector might look like this:
{
"price": "div.product__price"
}
Repeat this process for each data point you want to extract from the page. ScrapingBee supports a wide range of extraction techniques, from simple text scraping to attribute parsing to multi-page crawling. Here are a few examples:
Extracting text from a specific element:
{
"product_name": ".product-title"
}
Extracting an attribute value (e.g. image URL):
{
"image_url": {
"selector": ".product-image img",
"output": "@src"
}
}
Extracting multiple items in a list (e.g. reviews):
{
"reviews": {
"selector": ".review",
"type": "list",
"output": {
"name": ".review-name",
"rating": ".review-rating",
"text": ".review-text"
}
}
}
Check out the ScrapingBee docs for the full list of extraction options and parameters. When in doubt, you can always open up the Elements panel in Chrome DevTools and copy the CSS selector for any element.
After defining your extractions, test them out in the ScrapingBee dashboard to verify they return the expected data. Then, copy the generated API call for each page – we‘ll use these to automate the process in Integromat.
Step 3: Create a Competitor Monitoring Scenario in Integromat
Now for the fun part: building your automated tracking system! Integromat lets you create "scenarios" that define a series of automated steps and conditions. Here‘s how to set one up for competitor monitoring:
Create a new scenario and add a "Scheduler" module to determine how often it should run (e.g. every 6 hours).
Add a "HTTP" module to make a request to ScrapingBee. Paste in the API call you generated in the previous step, making sure to include your API key.
Add a "JSON" module to parse the response from ScrapingBee. This will convert the extracted data into a format Integromat can use in subsequent modules. Flatten the JSON structure if needed.
Add a "Router" module to specify conditions and logic flows. For example, you might want to compare the extracted price to the previously recorded value and only proceed if there‘s a difference greater than 10%.
Here‘s what the scenario might look like:
Repeat this process for each page you want to monitor, adjusting the HTTP module to point to the corresponding ScrapingBee API call. You can also add error handling using the "Webhooks" feature to get notified if any extractions fail.
Step 4: Put Your Intel Into Action
Congrats, you‘ve successfully automated data collection from your competitors‘ websites! But data without action is just a bunch of numbers on a screen. The final step is to pipe your extracted intel into the tools and processes where it can drive real business outcomes.
Integromat has native integrations with 1,000+ apps, so the possibilities are virtually endless. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Trigger a Slack alert if a competitor drops their prices below a certain threshold
- Append new reviews to a Google Sheet and use the Sheets integration to analyze average sentiment
- Create a new Trello card if a competitor publishes a new case study so your sales team can counter it in deals
- Send new job listings to your recruiting team in Greenhouse to inform talent market research
- Sync product specs to an Airtable database to track how your features stack up
The key is to align your integrations with stakeholders who can act on the data. Sending pricing intel to your finance team and product updates to your engineering squad will generate much more impact than siloed dashboards that no one checks.
Remember, the goal of competitor monitoring isn‘t to copy what others are doing, but to identify opportunities to differentiate yourself and better serve your customers. Used strategically, competitive intelligence can help you:
- Identify market gaps and unmet customer needs
- Optimize your pricing and packaging
- Refine your messaging and positioning
- Inform your product roadmap and R&D priorities
- Anticipate and respond to industry trends
- Enable your sales team to win more competitive deals
Automated Competitor Monitoring Best Practices
We‘ve covered a lot of ground in this guide, but there are a few key principles to keep in mind as you embark on your automated competitor tracking journey:
Start Small, Then Expand
Don‘t try to boil the ocean right out of the gate. Begin by tracking 2-3 data points for your top 1-2 competitors. Once you have a proof of concept, you can gradually expand your monitoring efforts.
Focus on Actionable Intel
It‘s easy to get overwhelmed by vanity metrics that don‘t actually impact your bottom line. Ruthlessly prioritize data points that will help you make better decisions and drive meaningful results. Quality beats quantity every time.
Set Clear Owners & Processes
Automating data collection is a huge time-saver, but you still need clear owners and processes to act on the intel. Establish roles and responsibilities upfront and schedule regular syncs to review findings.
Monitor the Right Cadence
Not all data points need to be tracked in real-time. Product updates may only happen monthly, while pricing changes could occur daily. Align your monitoring frequency to the natural cadence of each metric to avoid data overload.
Respect Rate Limits & IP Rotation
Web scraping has a bit of a bad rap due to bad actors who abuse sites with aggressive crawling. ScrapingBee has robust controls for rate limiting and rotating IP addresses, but it‘s still important to respect your targets‘ terms of service and robots.txt files. Use ScrapingBee responsibly.
Conclusion
If you‘ve made it this far, you‘re well on your way to becoming a competitor tracking pro! Let‘s recap the key takeaways:
- Automated competitor monitoring gives you a massive speed advantage
- Focus on data points that directly impact your strategic decisions
- Use ScrapingBee to extract web data and structure it for analysis
- Create Integromat scenarios to collect data on a set schedule
- Route extracted intel to your core business apps for seamless activation
- Start small, prioritize action, and scale gradually
Equipped with these tools and techniques, you‘re ready to replace guesswork with real-world intel that keeps you one step ahead of the competition. Here‘s to working smarter, not harder!
