Recently we had 12 visiting French people come by Leadfeeder’s office in Helsinki to find out how they can use our tool to help grow their business in 20 different countries.

The meeting and demo was a huge success but one of the moments of biggest surprise came when they saw how easy it was to track Competitors from one web page to the next and discover how long they spent on each page.

It got us thinking: is competitor tracking something we’re not talking enough about? After all, tracking your competitors offers powerful insights about what’s piquing their interest – in other words, what they’re not revealing in any other way.

Sure enough, getting more leads for their sales people is the main reason this French company will use Leadfeeder, but for them to know what their competitors are doing is important business intelligence that is hard to get anywhere else. Plus it’s so damn easy to do with Leadfeeder.

With this in mind, we’ve picked out 4 ways Leadfeeder is designed for competitor tracking:

1. You can see which pages your competitors visit on your website and when they visited.

When you see a company that has visited your website you should click on that company to expand all kinds of important details, like the web pages they visited, what day and time they visited and how long they stayed on each page reading your content. This applies to your competitor too.

2. You can see how your competitors arrive on your website.

Google organic search, Bing organic search, cost-per-click, Email newsletter? Leadfeeder reveals for every visit how your competitor came to your website and what they did once they got there. Maybe they’ve subscribed to your email newsletter and you didn’t even know?

3. You can get notified by email every time a competitor visits your website.

There are two easy ways to make sure this happens:

1. Use the star button to follow a competitor when they appear inside Leadfeeder. Once you do this the company will magically appear in your feed called “followed companies”, meaning they’ll be super easy to find every time you log in. You automatically receive email alerts from this feed so you don’t have to do anything more to stay up-to-date with your competitors’ activities. But you may want to take a look at customising your email notifications anyway – that’s always useful.

2. Tag competitors. You can use any word you want but “competitor” is probably a good place to start. We think it’s a better option than follow because it defines precisely why you’ve got your eye on this company. After this it’s easy to find competitors by searching for the tag or you could just as easily create a feed of companies matching the tag “competitor” and configure email alerts for this feed. I’ll be honest – we’ve got our eye on some competitors at Leadfeeder and we have a bit of fun with this feature.

4. You can identify new competitors

Instead of waiting for a customer to announce that they’re taking their custom to a new upstart you’ve never heard of, why not stay one step ahead by identifying new competitors before your customers do. By searching for your industry and using country or region filters you can quickly identify local and international competitors. It’s easy to log in and search manually whenever you want but we’d recommend just creating a feed with your chosen filters to catch competitors automatically. You can even configure the feed to send you email alerts.