Competitor Research

5 *Free* Easy Competitor Research Tips

5-free-competitor-research-tips

Let’s start by debunking the biggest myths I’ve heard from ecommerce merchants: their competitors don’t matter or they don’t have time for competitor research. Competitor research at first seems like a large task, but you can break it up and monitor competitors easily.

*Note, if you are running Google Smart Shopping Campaigns – none of this is for you! Google will optimize your campaigns automatically, so no worries!

1. Get Googling

Might sound pretty basic, but you’d be surprised at the number of merchants that haven’t done this. Put on your customer hat and google your keywords, your product names, your sector. Take an hour a week to do research and you will find new information. Additionally, there are some great free keyword suggestion tools. Our favorite is the Keywords Everywhere chrome extension – no promotion here, we just really love it. It shows you a bunch of similar keywords in a sidebar.

Some blogs mention going incognito for these Googleing sessions but I disagree. Keep your browser in regular mode. Why? You will see ads from your competitors you can use in the future.

How to find your Competitors on Google Shopping Ads, Amazon, & Amazon

You can see your competitors that are posting the same and similar products on Google Shopping Ads with emarketing’s free product list tool. Here, you can see competitors on each platform as well as the lowest price overall for every one of the listed platforms. Want to see a demo of this? Check out the emarketing full demo.

emarketing product list tool showing price comparison for competitors

2. Go shopping

Again, this one might be straight forward, but it’s worth your time. Go shopping on Amazon, Ebay, Google, and other big ecommerce hubs (Walmart, Zalando, Fashionista, etc.). This isn’t just to see what product descriptions and photos they are using in their Google Shopping Ads, but also their store’s user journey from start to finish. Some more great tools I love is Wapplyzer, which allows you to see the technical aspects of a site and the Alexa chrome plugin which shows you site ranking and speed.

a website for schuster showing technical aspects of the site
the website schuster with the wappalyzer plugin displayed

3. Make Yourself a Target

Like I mentioned before, this will happen automatically if you do step one and two in a regular browser. Getting yourself targeted will help you keep up to date on content trends, ad creatives, prices, and more.

4. Get a Good Price Research Tool

Of course, I’m going to recommend the free competitor check with emarketing. This is the dashboard, but you can also see detailed competitor information over Google, Amazon, and Ebay with the check.

emarketing dashboard with graphs and analytics

5. Subscribe, Follow, Creep

While you are doing your Googleing and shopping, make sure to subscribe, follow, and signup for any newsletters, events, deals, lists and social accounts as possible. Keeping updated via social media is a must – you never know what you might learn!

How to check your competitors on Facebook & Google Ads?

This one is pretty easy for Google Ads, but is harder for Facebook. Once you have your list of competitors (most likely from a competitor check), you can automatically see their ads and prices for Google Shopping Ads.

For Facebook, this is a bit harder but possible. New rules make sure that all pages’ ads are shown along with their info. It’s as simple as going to a competitors page and clicking on ‘Info and Ads’. The good part of this is that you will only see running ads, the bad is that you will have to do it for each individual competitor (emarketing is working on a tool to do this for you).

images of active ads for Sporthaus Schuster

Should you reprice items to stay competitive?

YES, but there are some things to consider. Before adjusting your prices to compete with a specific competitor price, ask yourself these questions…

  • Is my target customer the same as this competitor?
  • Is the product the same or similar enough?
  • Is there a way to point out differences in my product?
  • Is the product in the same condition as the competitor?
  • Is my competitor taking shipping into account?

If you are sure that your product is the same and you are ready to reprice, it might be a pain in the you-know-what to manually reprice all your items in your store. You can reprice your products easily using the emarketing repricing tool, that being said, if your goal of repricing is not to beat competitors you might want to reprice on your shop system directly.

emarketing repricing tool

So what do I do now?

To get started, I recommend heading over to emarketing.com and signing up for an account. The tool is free (yeah, I know – it’s seriously free), and it’s a great place to start with competitor research, especially if you are interested in advertising on Google.

Vist emarketing to receive your free Competitor Check today.

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