Pitfalls of Competitive Intelligence: Why You Should Be Careful About Monitoring Competitors

The success of a business depends on the organization’s ability to collect and accurately assess large volumes of data to inform its ongoing decision-making processes. However, there are a few things businesses need to look out for when monitoring their competitors.

Staying ahead of the competition can be difficult, but by working with a capable partner, you can stay on top of your product tracking. Visualping is a comprehensive website change detection and alert system that can monitor listings without all the hassle. If you want to learn how to collect competitive intelligence, trying out Visualping is the perfect solution.

Is Competitive Monitoring Worth It? Yes!

Many companies have yet to appreciate the value that intelligence-gathering on their competitors' products provides. Competitive monitoring is the perfect solution for tracking customers and marketing strategies, and when combined with competitive marketing, you can improve your business through tried and true best practices, filling any potential gaps in your workflow.

Another great thing about competitive marketing is that it gives you insights you can use to make better business decisions, improve your products and services, and set intelligent price points. Having a basic competitive marketing intelligence guide allows you to position your brand with advanced strategies you can use to take your new product ideas to the next level.

However, there are some limitations to competitive monitoring that you should be aware of.

The Potential Pitfalls of Competitive Monitoring

Despite being a valuable strategy for most businesses, competitive intelligence can incur some problems if it isn’t properly managed. It’s possible that you could offend your competitors while gathering information about them or even lose sight of what’s important by becoming too fixated on what they’re doing.

There’s no good reason to take a chance when the ability to learn about these problems is available ahead of time. Knowing the potential pitfalls of competitive monitoring will allow you to create better marketing strategies without putting your company at risk. To that end, three of the most helpful tips we can provide include the following:

1. Don’t Get Misled by Faulty or Insufficient Data

Modern businesses rely on real-world data to create a roadmap for their marketing strategies, but that can cause a problem if the information collected is, in some part, inaccurate or completely wrong altogether. Whether intentional or not, faulty or insufficient data can be a significant issue for organizations.

It’s important to be aware of how much you rely on data for day-to-day processes. Unverified data can be misleading, resulting in poor decisions and throwing your strategy off track.

2. Too Much Focus on What Your Competitors Are Doing Can Actually Hold Your Business Back

While competitive intelligence is an excellent means of scoring some insights into your competitors, relying on it too heavily can leave you with an unclear picture of the needs of your own organization. Even good data can hold your business back if you don’t know how to apply it properly.

Competitive intelligence lets you keep up with market trends, but it can also give you a false sense of security when it comes to the competition. You may be less likely to innovate, offer new products and services, or grow your brand, which can leave your organization stagnant.

3. Your Competition Might Find Your Monitoring to Be Intrusive or Undesired

Although you naturally have a competitive relationship with other businesses, it’s still important to be aware of how they perceive you. If the companies you’re monitoring discover that you are collecting data about them, they may target you specifically as a threat, thereby making it harder to grow your business.

When collecting competitive intelligence, you should be aware that your competitors can monitor your activities. Data collection activities are usually detectable, and rival businesses may not be too happy about you essentially “spying” on them.

With that being said, using a reliable third-party tool can make your competitive marketing activities easier to manage and harder to track.

Keep an Eye on the Competition with Visualping

Tracking online products and services can be complicated, making it harder to see what the competition is up to. You can manually check back on a listing every now and again, but most companies will want a better solution that’s capable of giving them an edge against the competition.

Visualping is an AI-powered website change detection, monitoring, and alert system designed to make your life easier. Leveraging Visualping to monitor website changes allows you to see what your competitors are doing so you can create better marketing strategies without losing sight of your core vision.

When Visualping detects a change on a web page you're tracking, you receive an email alert, with an AI-generated summary of the competitor update. The alert also includes a screenshot of the page, with the changes highlighted, so it's easy to understand.

Visualping takes care of all the details so you can focus on the bigger picture, and we let you monitor changes on any web source on the internet, giving you everything you need to tailor a unique competitive monitoring strategy.

You may wonder, though, what it is that makes Visualping so different. In response, we can proudly say that Visualping is:

Simple

Other monitoring tools can be difficult to use, with a mountain of options so large that users get frustrated and give up. Visualping, on the other hand, cuts through the noise and nuance of competitive monitoring so you can find the data that matters to you. Our seamless interface removes the clutter, giving you everything you need to get things done.

Intelligent

Most competitive intelligence tools are limited in regard to where they can collect data from, so if you want to remain competitive in today’s market, you need a monitoring solution with the flexibility to collect relevant data from wherever you want.

The great thing about Visualping is that you can monitor any web page, or part thereof, for updates at regular intervals. Visualping will notify you instantly when a change occurs, giving you a chance to collect the information you need before it’s too late.

Affordable

Competitive intelligence has a lot of moving parts, so an affordable tool that is capable of handling everything you throw at it will allow you to improve your marketing campaigns and eliminate inefficiencies from the process. That’s why we created Visualping.

New users can try Visualping for absolutely free for as long as they like. Starting with a maximum of five pages checked once per day, you can easily upgrade to a better plan if you need something more comprehensive.

Businesses can take advantage of the 20K package, which allows up to 500 pages to be checked per day at intervals as small as every five minutes. With such great prices, it’s no wonder more companies are turning to Visualping every day for their competitive intelligence needs.

Visualping Is Your Partner for Competitive Intelligence

Collecting and analyzing data has become a central task for many companies, especially those that are about to gear up for new marketing campaigns. Leaders who want to make the best business decisions rely on quality data to give them insights that they can rely on while growing the organization. Visualping is trusted by more companies as a trusted partner for competitive intelligence campaigns. With Visualping, you’ll be able to improve your ROI faster and without all the overhead.

Visualping is the perfect tool for you to compare competitor websites, social media channels, earned media, and more. Setting up your Visualping account will allow you to stay on top of price changes, new product launches, published content, and more. We’ll send you price change notifications directly to you via email, SMS, or other communication channels, depending on your needs.

Try Visualping for free today and find out whether it’s the competitive intelligence tool that’s right for you. Contact us today to learn more.