Ready to get a little James Bond-ish on the ecommerce world? In this post you’ll discover the best ways to spy on your Amazon competitors and take your sales to the next level.
1. VisualPing Their Site for Changes in Activity
You spend a lot of time on your own site, tweaking it so it delivers great user experience (UX) and looks great. As a result, you’re intimately familiar with every nook and cranny and can draw it out from memory if asked.
There’s no way you can extend that to your competitors’ sites, and nor should you be expected to either. Your day is filled with more — and more important — tasks, but knowing what kinds of changes they make to their sites is a big boost for you. Luckily, there’s a site called VisualPing that can notify you of changes and alterations.
2. Use Alexa to Your Advantage
If you’ve never heard of VisualPing, that’s okay. We’ve got a site that’ll sound far more familiar to your ears: Alexa. It operates quite differently in that you don’t get email notifications of your competitors’ sites, but rather see how they stack up against you and the rest of the world in general.
This one’s super handy because you can see how you and your competitors rank globally in terms of position, if that number has gone up or down, and how positions have changed over the last day, week, month and three months. Plus, you can keep track of their backlinks, keywords and traffic — all useful tools you can use to your advantage.
3. Become a Blog Reader
One of the most basic tips in ranking high in a Google search is to provide regular, novel content. And the easiest way to do that is to maintain a blog where you can plug in relevant keywords and keep high in the search pages.
So, given that blogs are an amazing place for new information, why not read your competitors’? You’ll get the first-hand scoop on what they’re doing and looking at in the future, as well as what aspect they’re playing from (i.e. what areas of interest they’re focused on).
4. Social Media Habits Reveal A Lot
Want to know what your competitors are doing on Facebook and Twitter without becoming a full-time marketing expert? Simple, don’t while away countless hours trolling their accounts, especially when you’ve got a tool like InfiniGraph at your beck and call.
InfiniGraph works by analysing big data, like video content interaction, giving you an inside look at the stuff consumers find most interesting. You can use this to change the types of videos you present to your buyers, instead of wasting time on videos that just won’t get a lot of hits.
Twitter-Specific Spying
It can be a lot of work to look at data from multiple social media sites, so Topsy helps you out by narrowing things down to just Twitter. Plus, you have the ability to search through their tweets from all the way to 2007, which is just a year after the social media platform started. How you want to leverage Topsy to your advantage is to see which tweets are most popular (and when), what the biggest influences are, and how trends change on a day-to-day basis.
5. Get the Whole Deal
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Topsy is Quantcast, which helps you track data in a whole bunch of areas: age and demographics, conversion level, and personal and lifestyle interests. We can’t stress enough how important marketing is, especially smart marketing. If you can configure ads to target buyers as specifically as possible, you’ll be off to the races.
*Originally published here
