Top 8 Market Research Websites Make You Understand Your Industry and Competitors

Businesses conduct market research for several reasons. This could be in response to various triggering events, assessing changes over time, or evaluating past performances. You can partner with a market research firm or use market research tools to do so. As you know, regardless of industry, marketing is like a game of getting the attention of your target audience first. 

However, with all the thousands of market research software and other resources available today, it can sometimes be confusing to know where to start. Don't worry; we've got you covered with the right market research websites to help you better understand your competitors and your business industry. 

What to look for in a competitor analysis tool?

With fast-paced innovations, you can expect to encounter thousands of market research websites that can be helpful to your company. However, you can only effectively maximize them if you know the core features these websites and software must have. 

• Social media monitoring. This lets you get data about your competitor's engagement levels and their followership and monitor sentiments and brand mentions towards the competitor's company. 
• Keyword research. As the competitor analysis software analyzes the keywords they target, you'll have a better understanding and overview of their content strategy and identify new opportunities to optimize your website. 
• Backlink profiling. A good market research website must also see who's linking to competitors' websites and how the backlinks help their SEO. 
• Website traffic monitoring. Using such software, your team can learn where competitors' website traffic is coming from, including search ranking positions and monthly search volume. 

Best Market Research Tools and Websites to Understand your Industry and Competitors

We've collated the top eight competitor analysis websites and tools to efficiently show how your team can see what the competitors are up to. Check the succeeding sections.

Meltwater

This platform stands as one of the most comprehensive PR technology solutions available, designed to help companies develop well-rounded strategies all in one place. By utilizing advanced AI-driven tools, it turns raw data from online insights, conversations, and social media into actionable information. This transformation empowers your company to make informed decisions and move forward with greater confidence. With everything streamlined on a single platform, it enables you to manage, monitor, and optimize your PR efforts efficiently and effectively.

Features

• Global media monitoring
• Benchmark performance
• Sentiment analysis
• Custom reporting
• Comprehensive media analysis

Benefits

• Thorough reporting
• Powerful medial monitoring
• All-in-one PR analysis tool

Use cases: Suitable for PR and social media

Pricing: $1,000/user/month

Phlanx

Phlanx is an innovative online platform that connects companies and PR professionals to a wide range of marketing opportunities. It offers valuable tools for measuring engagement across popular platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Phlanx excels at competitive analysis by providing context for how brands perform on different social media channels. One of its standout features is the engagement ratio tool, which calculates the number of followers in relation to how often they interact with content. This allows businesses to maximize their social media efforts by identifying and leveraging key areas for improvement and growth.

Features

• Social media auditor
• Brand mentions
• Influencer directory
• Engagement calculator manager
• Competitor tracker
• Campaign manager

Benefits

• Easy navigation
• Availability of templates for contracts
• Allows brand linking and collaboration

Use cases: Influencer marketing, PR, contract management, social media engagement

Pricing: (billed annually)

• Basic: $39/mo
• Premium: $60/mo
• Business: $90/mo

BuzzSumo

Your company can preview the top-performing content on relevant topics for your brand and competitors. BuzzSumo also looks into specific content's engagement on several social networks, including its overall shares across the web. This lets you see who among your competitors is performing well in your industry and also helps your company explore hot topics that will be useful in your marketing strategies. 

Features

• Idea generation
• Content research
• Influencer discovery
• Content brief generator
• Keyword search

Benefits

• Deep competitive analysis
• Covers any type of contents
• Excellent content analysis functionalities
• Powerful discovery toolkit

Use cases: Content trends analysis

Pricing: 

• Content Creation - $199/mo for one user
• PR & Comms - $299/mo for five users
• Suite - $499/mo for ten users
• Enterprise - $999/mo for 30 users

Similarweb

A huge media following and content are not the only indicators of a competitor's success. Website traffic could also provide insights and patterns that you can use to understand how engaging and popular your competitor's websites are compared to yours. Some of the data you can generate with Similarweb include page views, number of visitors, and engagements. It can digest the sources of the competitor's website traffic, like social media, search engines, referrals, and direct traffic. 

Features

• Keyword group analysis
• Customized industries
• Keyword search
• Traffic overview
• Digital marketing AI

Benefits

• Excellent user interface
• Offers organic keywords
• Large scale data
• Ability to export reports

Use cases: Website traffic monitoring

Pricing: (billed annually)

• Starter - $125/mo for one user
• Professional - $ 333/mo for one user

Mailcharts

Email marketing data and statistics might be the most challenging to collect from your competitors. However, with Mailcharts, you can pull out essential campaign metrics to see how your competitors perform in this marketing strategy. It can track email campaigns and show which emails are being sent, the campaign frequency, and the content of the emails. 

Features

• Targeting data and market segmentation
• Promotion tracking
• Conversion data and CTAs
• Season and holiday email samples
• Industry insights
• Email reports and scores

Benefits

• Huge email library
• User-friendly interface
• Offers collaboration tools
• Provides real-time and historical email data

Use cases: Email marketing

Pricing: $149/mo ($49 per additional user)

Social Blade

The number of followers is a big deal today, especially if your business is on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Monitoring your competitors' performance on social media platforms is vital to competitive analysis. There are times when, even if a competitor is doing great on social media, the data might tell otherwise. This tool provides daily follower updates so you'd know how your competitor's following changes over time. 

Features

• Social blade ranking
• Subscriber ranking
• Video views ranking
• Influencer search
• Customizable reports
• Live counts

Benefits

• Tracks essential data across platforms
• User-friendly navigation
• Useful Compare feature
• Affordable plans

Use cases: Follower and subscriber tracking

Pricing

• Bronze: $3.99/mo
• Silver: $9.99/mo
• Gold: $39.99/mo
• Platinum: $9.99/mo

Ahrefs

A market research agency usually uses this software to maximize competitive analysis features, which help it reverse engineer competitors' online strategies. With Ahrefs, users can check a URL's leading organic keywords and get a rough estimate of the volume of traffic the competitor receives through those keywords. Through the backlinks, you can check the competitor's highest-performing content. This way, you'd know the types of products or content that work best for your brand in your industry.

Features

• Site audit
• Content explorer
• Keywords explorer
• Dashboard
• Rank tracker
• Site explorer

Benefits

• Access to all essential tools associated with SEO
• Generous domain verification system
• Available in 14 languages
• Gentle learning curve

Use cases: SEO

Pricing

• Lite - $129/mo
• Standard - $249/mo
• Advanced - $449/mo
• Enterprise - $14,990/yr

Moz

This browser extension tool offers a surface-level preview of how authoritative a website is through the eyes of Google. Moz's Domain Authority (DA) metric assigns websites a DA score based on the likelihood of ranking in top search engines. Of course, the higher the DA scores, the better the competitor's performance. 

Features

• Custom reports
• Link building wizard
• Keyword explorer
• Audience analysis
• Competitor tracking

Benefits

• Excellent support articles and help section
• Comprehensive toolkit
• Easy to use
• Reliable rank tracker
• Excellent metrics and reporting

Use cases: website authority

Pricing

• Standard: $99/mo for one user
• Medium: $179/mo for two users
• Large: $299/mo
• Premium: $599/mo

Summary: Top 8 Market Research Websites Make You Understand Your Industry and Competitors 

The table below shows a quick preview of what you can expect from these market research tools and websites. It's best to compare them and see which one is ideal for your competitor analysis processes. 

FAQs

Q: Why is a competitor analysis tool necessary?

A: Competitor analysis tools illustrate a comprehensive perspective of the competitor's online presence. These tools help companies identify the potential threats and opportunities. Since you're given insights from your competitor's performance, you'd know what will and won't work for your business.

Q: What are the best market research platforms to use today?

A: It depends on the company and the specific data you want to get from your competitors. The list we provided above covers various aspects of market research, so you can choose one or combine two or three software programs. 

Q: Is it better to purchase the expensive analysis tool provider?

A: It's not necessary to subscribe to expensive plans. Your team can try the free trial version of the software and assess whether the features are worth the hundreds of dollars subscription.