A competitor cuts the price of a key product, adds a new variant, or starts a promotion. In many marketing and product teams, nobody notices until someone happens to visit the website. The research is done by hand, the results end up in a spreadsheet, and when a campaign is finally ready, the moment has passed.
To automate competitor monitoring means to shorten this path. You collect data on a regular basis, check it with clear rules, and prepare concrete actions. If you only look at prices, this is called price monitoring. This article shows how such a process is built, where a person makes the decision, and what you should check before you start.
Why manual competitor monitoring is rarely enough
The problems are similar in most companies:
- No central overview. Information is spread across browser tabs, newsletters and notes.
- Research takes a lot of time. Comparing prices and products by hand ties up time, and in practice teams only check a small selection of competitors and products.
- A gap between analysis and action. Insights go to the campaign team by email and compete with other tasks.
- Reactive planning. Campaigns react to events instead of using current data. Decisions then rely more on assumptions than on numbers.
The main gap is between watching the market and day-to-day marketing work. This is where automation helps.
Competitive analysis and competitor monitoring: what you can automate
A classic competitive analysis looks at positioning, strengths and weaknesses, or market share. It stays a strategic task. People do it every few months, and that makes sense.
Ongoing competitor monitoring is different. It is routine: the same sources, the same figures, the same questions. This routine is a good fit for automation. It has three parts:
- Collect: gather the relevant data on a regular basis.
- Check: find changes with fixed rules.
- Act: prepare the right actions and send them to the right people.
What an automated process looks like (example)
The example below shows one possible process. You adapt sources, limits and actions to your company.
- Collect data: Prices, new products and promotions are retrieved on a regular basis, for example every day, from sources you chose in advance and that are open to the public.
- Prepare data: The raw data is cleaned up and passed to a spreadsheet or a BI system, so your teams can work with it.
- Check rules: A trigger checks the data. Example: “Competitor X cuts the price of product Y by more than 20 percent.”
- Prepare an action: Depending on the rule, a draft is created: an email campaign with a counter offer, a social media post, or a message to the product team.
- A person approves: Before anything goes out, a responsible person checks the draft and the data and approves or rejects it.
- Reach the right group: Affected customer groups are selected in the CRM, and the approved action goes to exactly these groups.
A good first step is competitor price monitoring. You track the prices of a fixed set of products every day, and a rule sends a message when a competitor goes below a set limit. If you want to go further and change your own prices automatically, look at the reference Stylefile. There, more than 50,000 price changes run automatically every day across several marketplaces.
Why a person decides before anything goes out
Automation does not mean that campaigns start without a check. Price reactions affect margin, brand image and competition law. So it is wise to split the work clearly: collecting, checking and drafting run automatically, and a person decides on everything that goes to the outside.
In swoox.io, you model such a process as a BPMN 2.0 process. Steps, responsibilities and approvals are part of the process model, and the business team can follow them. Every run can be logged. To learn how the rules work behind the scenes, read the article What is a business rules engine?
Legal and technical points to check
Before you start, clarify four points:
- Data sources: Not every website allows automated access. Check the terms of use, the technical access rules and the legal situation of each source. Interfaces, data feeds or licensed data are the cleaner choice where they exist.
- Comparative advertising: If you publish price comparisons, competition law applies. Statements must be provable and fair, so plan a legal review before publishing.
- Customer data: As soon as you use your CRM to select groups, the GDPR applies. It matters where data is processed. swoox runs on-premise or as PaaS in the EU.
- Data quality: Prices collected automatically can be wrong, for example with tiered prices, variants or time-limited offers. Add plausibility checks to the process.
These notes are not legal advice.
More marketing processes with the same pattern
The idea “collect data, check a rule, prepare an action” works for other processes too. Examples are personalized newsletters based on user behavior, sending content across several channels, lead nurturing with dynamic segments, campaign triggers based on stock levels, weather or location, and tracking mentions of brands and products.
How to measure the benefit
Before the process starts, it helps to note a starting value. Three figures are enough at the beginning:
- Hours per week spent on manual research.
- Time from a market change to an action.
- Share of campaigns that are based on current data.
After a few weeks of running, the comparison shows what the process really brings. This is more reliable than a general promise.
Conclusion
Competitor monitoring becomes useful when watching the market turns into a process with clear rules, responsibilities and approvals. The technology takes the routine work off the team. The decision about what goes out stays with people.
We are happy to show you in a demo how such a process can be set up for your company. Request a demo
