Would you like to know how your competitors are winning attendees and driving ticket sales online?

You might be surprised by the amount of information you can gather about rival events using perfectly legal, and often free-to-try, tools.

Utilise these 5 competitive research tools to discover insights such as what keywords rival events are using, your competitors’ ad budgets and how much traffic they’re clocking up.

Once you have that valuable data you can put together an intelligence-backed marketing strategy that will help your event take a slice of the pie.

For keyword research

1. SpyFu

Simply enter your competitor’s URL into SpyFu and you can see every Google AdWords keyword they’ve ever bidded on (and how much they’ve spent). See how they started their AdWords campaign and how they optimised their copy and keyword groups over time to increase conversion rates – SpyFu has data going back 10-years.

You can also look at an individual keyword and see everybody that’s ever advertised on that keyword. If it’s a keyword all your competitors are going after then that’s a strong indication you should be too.

For more guidance, enter your own web address and receive SpyFu’s AdWord’s Advisor Report, giving you a list of top keywords you should be buying.

Finally, you can use SpyFu to see your competitors’ backlinks (external websites linking to your competitor’s URL). See which of these are the most valuable and which websites you should approach for backlink opportunities yourself.

SpyFu

Related: How to do keyword research for your event

For backlink research

2. Moz Pro

Backlinks are still the cornerstone of getting good SEO results for your event’s website (in other words, being listed at the top of a Google search).

To help figure out how to get more backlinks to your website, Moz Pro offers a comprehensive package of SEO tools; one of these is Open Site Explorer.

Open Site Explorer lets you enter your own or a competitor’s URL to view inbound links. See how many there are, which domains they originate from, the anchor text being used for those links and the top pages for backlinks (the pages earning the most external links).

It gives you the predicted domain authority for the URL (the root domain’s ranking potential in search engines) as well as the page authority for individual pages, allowing you to assess a site’s influence.

Another functionality is Link Opportunities, which provides three reports helping you to build backlinks. The first tells you about any broken links so you can get these fixed, the second gives you a list of unlinked mentions of your event so you can reach out and ask nicely if they will add one in for you.

The third report lets you enter two competitor URLs that you feel you should be listed alongside and shows you any website that links to both but not yours. This can identify potential targets for outreach.

Moz Pro’s Open Site Explorer

Related: The ultimate guide to free event promotion ideas

For traffic research

3. SimilarWeb

Want to see how much traffic your competitor’s website is really attracting? SimilarWeb not only shows you how many visitors a site has, it also details average visit duration, average number of pages viewed per visit and bounce rate.

See what countries that traffic is coming from and the sources driving it i.e. direct, organic/paid search, social, referrals, email or display ads. SimilarWeb allows you to dig deeper still with further detail about each source, breaking down the referring sites, showing which social sites send the most traffic and where that URL is advertising. All this gives you an invaluable sneak peak at your rival’s marketing strategy.

You can also see other websites frequently visited by users of that site, and a list of websites it deems similar to the one you’ve searched enabling you to broaden your competitor analysis.

SimilarWeb

Related: How to boost your mobile ticket sales

For ads research

4. WhatRunsWhere

If your competitor’s event is a sell-out success, you’ll want to know where they advertised. WhatRunsWhere can help you find out. This tool shows you exactly where your competitors are advertising and what ads they’re using. But, more than that, it is also able to give insight into which ads are working for them, and which aren’t.

WhatRunsWhere provides access to campaign data from 150,000 display publishers, 90+ classified ad networks, and 15 different countries, enabling you to see the top performing campaigns – and effectively plan your own.

To ensure you don’t miss an opponent’s move, this tool allows you to track a list of competitors and receive an alert every time they launch a new ad or publish new content.

WhatRunsWhere

Related: Your guide to using Facebook and Twitter advertising for events

For social research

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo lets you listen in on your competitors’ online conversations, monitor the content they share on social networks, and see which content is getting the most traction.

Simply enter their URL and see a list of their top shared content. The number of shares is broken down across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn so you can see which platforms they are having the most success on.

You can also view who is sharing their content and identify key influencers that you can, in turn, reach out to. Use the information to shape your content marketing plan, looking at the topics they’ve covered, the titles of their most popular pieces, the length of those pieces and what day they were published.

Compare how your content is performing in comparison or compare two competitors side by side. And make sure you never miss when they publish something new with competitor content alerts.

Buzzsumo

Related: 5 Tools for finding your event’s biggest fans on social media 

Conclusion

As the saying goes, “Knowledge is power.” Use these Google-friendly competitive intelligence tools to lift the lid on your competitors’ strategies and improve your chances of powering your way to a sold-out event!