TheOfficialBoard

Corporate data about people’s roles and functions within different organizations is becoming increasingly public. All you need to do is search on LinkedIn to get a person’s entire work history or Jigsaw to find their direct contact information. Now you can add TheOfficialBoard, a contact database which goes one step further. It shows the organization charts for 20,000 of the largest companies, so you can … [ Read more ]

SpyFU

If you handle pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, this is your ultimate reconnaissance tool. Use it to find out how much is being spent on PPC advertising by category or industry… or you may prefer to drill down and discover how much a competitor is spending per day on PPC, plus the number of clicks their site is receiving per day, the average position of their ad … [ Read more ]

netFactor VisitorTrack

Assuming we understand correctly what’s going on here, this company has a tool that looks at the IP address of each visitor to your site. It then researches the IP address to come up with the corporate domain name associated with that IP address. It then cross-references the corporate domain name with a business record database to fill in the blanks in terms of company … [ Read more ]

Learn to Conduct Competitive Analysis

This PowerPoint training tool shows you how to analyze your company’s competitive advantages and disadvantages. This tool explains the strategic group map technique of competitive analysis and includes a case study that illustrates how one company used this technique to plan an expansion of its facilities and services. This tool can help you improve your own understanding of competitive analysis or you can share it … [ Read more ]

Eliyon

Eliyon is a search engine that indexes the profiles of business professionals and companies. As of late 2004, the Eliyon database included more than 22 million profiles of executives in the US, and more are added every day. To find new data, Eliyon crawls the Web and automatically extracts executive names and details from press releases, news articles, company websites and SEC filings. Originally intended … [ Read more ]

URLinfo

This tool will tell you everything you ever wanted to know – and more – about any URL. Simply type in a URL, and more than 100 tools are at your fingertips, neatly organized in a tabbed interface. Starting with the “General” tab, with just a click you can view Alexa’s ranking and feedback for the URL or gather WHOis information, for example. Move on … [ Read more ]

Evaliant

You can see exactly where and how your competitors are advertising online with the Evaliant service, which scans thousands of sites for current advertising activity (including selected search engines). Pick a brand, and you have access to agency contacts, a list of sites where the ads ran, how often the ads are appearing and what the ads actually look like – up to and including … [ Read more ]

Linktree Link Popularity Analyzer

Linktree offers a no-cost tool that will tell you, site by site, who is linking to your competitors but is NOT linking to you. Simply enter the URLs of at least five competitors, enter your URL, and voila! Out pops a list of those websites that are excluding you from the linking party, plus links to the pages where your competitors’ links appear. You can … [ Read more ]

Keyword Counter

What’s your competition doing right that you aren’t? The no-cost tool found at Keyword Counter allows you to compare your site’s keywords, metatags, alt tags and descriptions to a competitor’s to see how you stack up. Simply enter the two URLs for comparison and within seconds you will be served with a list of the top keywords found on the pages, including the number of … [ Read more ]

Portals to the World

For the global executive (or domestic executive with a global business, for that matter) the Web is a great resource for finding country information. One of the strongest resources is the Library of Congress Web site’s “Portals to the World” section, which offers links to a wide range of information on dozens of countries, with topics including education, embassies, geography and environment, national security, and … [ Read more ]

UCLA Rosenfeld Library CI Primer

If you’re really a market warrior at heart, here’s a great place that details a step-by-step “check out the competition” process. The UCLA Rosenfeld Library has a site devoted to Competitive Intelligence that lists the questions to ask and links to the places to find the answers.
The questions fall into three categories: the corporate picture … [ Read more ]

MarketRelevance

A resource for following the direct mail industry, MarketRelevance captures over 25,000 traditional and email promotions each year. You can search by individual company or by promotion to find out who’s mailing what and through which channels. Great resource for getting ideas, seeing what’s going on in the industry and checking out competitor campaigns. It’s a valuable addition to the … [ Read more ]

Associations Unlimited

Associations Unlimited combines data from the entire Encyclopedia of Associations series and includes additional IRS information on nonprofit organizations, for a total of nearly 457,000 organizations. The database also contains association materials — brochures, logos and membership applications. Public and academic librarians, library users, business people and staff of nonprofit associations find Associations Unlimited an indispensable source for: locating national, international and local associations; monitoring … [ Read more ]

Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Take me back, take me waaaay back. “Way back” in Internet years is 1996, when the Internet Archive started crawling the Web, collecting over 100 terabytes of data in the process. The database grows at a rate of 12 terabytes per month. Enter a URL and view it through the ages. This site can be used for competitive research, for sales and marketing data, or … [ Read more ]

Search Systems

This site claims to be the first and the largest collection of free public records on the internet. Find information sources by browsing categories or by the newly added search feature at the top of the page (help on how to use the Public Record Finder is available just below the search box).

This site is free but there are some links on the site … [ Read more ]

Whois.net

This handy little domain name registrar is a great competitive research tool. Enter any company name or keyword, and you will be served with a list of domain names that contain that word. Click on any of them, and you can find out who owns the domain name, including addresses, phone numbers and emails for the administrative and technical contacts. Use the “Suggest A Name” … [ Read more ]

Spyonit

Spyonit simplifies life online by helping you stay on top of the things you care about. You tell a “spy” what to watch for on the Internet, and when something changes, it reports back to you wherever you are: by email, instant message, mobile phone or PDA. A spy can tell you when an item you’re looking for shows up on any auction site; when … [ Read more ]

Who’s Mailing What! Archive

The Who’s Mailing What! database, brought to you by Target Marketing, allows you to search thousands of direct mail pieces by company, mailing category, mail date, mailer name, four-color, premium, self mailer, personalization and more. Zero in on what your competition is mailing, including tests and new offers. Use the search by category (e.g. web sites, jewelry, etc.) feature to peruse trends in business and … [ Read more ]

TrackEngine

Here is a tool to manage the ever-expanding sea of information on the Internet. Using TrackEngine you can visit any webpage and with a couple of clicks get email alerts when the page is updated. Track any change or just specific event changes (using keyword filters or content summaries). Useful for competitive intelligence or personal interest. And there’s no software or downloads … [ Read more ]

CI Success Stories

Feeling confused and frustrated about ways in which companies use competitive intelligence? Fuld and Company presents CI Success Stories, a database of short stories detailing successful competitive intelligence uses in a variety of topics in an array of industries. Highlight a topic and an industry, and CI Success Stories will generate a paragraph-long example of good uses of competitive intelligence. The site also contains a … [ Read more ]