Competitive monitoring

Competitive monitoring gets set up on a Monday and dies three weeks later. The script never varies: someone opens a spreadsheet, lists fifteen competitors, creates twelve columns, fills it in once, and never opens it again.

This is not a discipline problem. It is that monitoring built this way leads to no decision at all, and work that changes nothing always stops eventually.

The question that replaces all the others

Before choosing what to watch, work out what you would do with the information. One question:

If this number moved by 20%, would I change anything this week?

If the answer is no, do not track it. On its own, that question removes most of what usually goes into competitive monitoring: follower counts, posts, hires, funding rounds.

It is interesting. It is not actionable. And monitoring cluttered with the interesting buries the actionable.

The four things worth watching

1. The prices actually charged

Not the prices on a marketing page: the ones on product pages, discounts included. This is the fastest signal a market gives: a competitor cutting prices for good is preparing something, and you have a few weeks to decide whether you follow.

Track the spread, not the average. How many products sit in each price band. An average moves as soon as the list of products changes, without anything having happened in the market.

2. Sellers arriving and leaving

Who appears, who disappears. One arrival on your exact segment matters more than a funding round in the press: the first concerns you this week, the second maybe in two years.

Watch out for noise. A seller who shows up with a single item drifts in and out of your data by chance. We only count one once at least three of their products turn up: that is our threshold, and it exists precisely so we do not report movements that never happened.

3. What customers complain about

Your competitors' reviews are market research somebody else paid for, and it updates itself.

Read the 2 and 3 star reviews. Five stars teach you nothing; one star is mostly about delivery and support. The middle is where the product itself gets criticised, and that is where your selling point comes from.

A complaint that appears and then keeps repeating is the most valuable signal in the whole exercise: it hands you a position to take, phrased by the market itself.

4. Demand

Monthly search volume for the market, month by month. It is the one indicator that is not about your competitors but about the ground you are all standing on.

A market that is shrinking while everyone fights on price explains everything else. Without it, you are interpreting movements without knowing which way the floor tilts.

How often

The right frequency is the one at which the number genuinely moves. Any more often and you are measuring the noise of your own method.

• Prices: monthly is enough in most markets. Weekly if you compete head-on with identical items.
• Sellers: quarterly. A serious new entrant does not stay hidden for three months.
• Reviews: quarterly. Recurring complaints take months to form; looking weekly only shows you isolated cases.
• Demand: monthly, keeping the history. One data point says nothing; twelve draw a season.

One caveat that applies to all of the above: readings of the same market are not exactly reproducible from one day to the next. Results vary, sellers appear and vanish with nothing having changed. Only call a rise or a fall when the gap clearly exceeds what you see between two readings taken on the same day. Below that, you are commenting on your own measurement method.

The format that survives

Monitoring lasts if it produces a page, not a spreadsheet. Four numbers, the date they were taken, and what has changed since last time.

The twelve-column table fails for a mechanical reason: it asks you to compare two states yourself, every time you read it. Nobody does that more than three times. What is worth keeping from monitoring is not the state: it is the change.

And keep the readings. A single figure is worth nothing; it is the series that tells you whether this month's move is out of the ordinary.

What to stop doing

• Following fifteen competitors. Three will do: the leader, the one closest to you, and the fastest new entrant. The other twelve will never change a decision of yours.
• Copying out their “about” pages. That is communication, not data.
• Reading a low cost per click as weak competition. Cost per click tells you what a visitor is worth, not who you are up against. A market can be crowded and cheap to advertise in: that happens when nobody in it is making money.
• Comparing two markets when only one has been measured. The most common mistake, and the most expensive: your market has data, the other has a feeling, and the comparison always leans the same way.

Monitoring and market research are not the same thing

Market research is an entry decision: you do it once, before you start, and it answers “does this market hold up?”.

Monitoring is what comes afterwards. It answers “is what was true still true?”. Both look at the same numbers and use them differently, and monitoring set up without the research first watches a market whose size nobody knows.

If you have not done that first piece of work, start there, then with competitor analysis, which gives you the photograph that monitoring will then simply keep current.

The only real test

Useful monitoring is not judged by its number of sources or the neatness of its table. It is judged on one thing: how many decisions it changed this year.

If the answer is none after six months, the problem is not that you are keeping it badly. It is that you are watching the wrong numbers, and four that matter beat fifteen nobody reads.