“Want to know how many website visitors your competitor is getting? No problem. How about their top keywords or top performing advertisement? That’s there too…”

Every now and then we’d like to shine the spotlight on a cool new piece of technology that’s going to help your business. It may be a physical product, web application, software tool… whatever it is, we think it’s good enough to share with you. We know you are busy, so if there is a gadget or widget out there to make life easier/improve productivity/save you money/ reach more customers… then we want our customers to know about it.

Let’s start with a new application we’ve been using here at the Freshmethod office which monitors and tracks everything your competitor is doing online, simply called ‘Follow’ or follow.net. Sounds very ‘secret agent’ doesn’t it, but essentially it’s a competitor intelligence tool that appears in your internet browser.

What You See

Want to know how many website visitors your competitor is getting? No problem. How about their top keywords or what kind of paid online advertising they’re doing? That’s there too. In fact, it even estimates your competitor’s estimated monthly Search Engine Marketing spend (also known as SEM) and where they are getting most of their site traffic from. Incredible insights for a predominately free service and very handy when trying to evaluate your own online marketing efforts.

How it Works

If you are familiar with google analytics for your own site, then you’ll quickly know your way around the software. Even if you aren’t, it’s fairly intuitive. The only slightly confusing part for the novice user is all the sources the data draws from. It can appear as if the information is being repeated, but with slightly different results, which can give the user a small dose of analysis paralysis. Why can’t there just be one?  Well it’s because there are some inaccuracies in each of the sources, so by providing a number of sources gives a better and more accurate overall picture on how the site is performing.

There are a number of YouTube ‘how to’ videos you can reference to help make sense of it all and the guys over at Follow.net gave us a breakdown explanation of each area, so that we could pass it on to our customers.  We found the extra knowledge to be really helpful. That information can be found on our website here.

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