businesses across the board are investing more and more in competitive intelligence but what most businesses miss out on exploring is how to make the most of that investment. Contrary to popular belief, more data does not mean more insights. It just means you are wading through more data than you should be to get your valuable insights.

So, with our decades of experience in retail competitor monitoring and price intelligence, we’ve put together 8 ways you can optimise your competitor and price monitoring efforts to understand where you have a competitive pricing advantage and promptly capitalise on it.

Focus on your most price-sensitive products: The first thing every business looking to make the most of their investment in competitor price monitoring must do is to identify their most price-sensitive products. This is because you are most likely to get a competitive price advantage on these products and when you do, you want to act quickly to make the most of it.

This does not mean you mustn’t monitor your not-so-price-sensitive products. You definitely need to. But you can monitor competitors for those products between once a day to once a week depending on your product, industry, and audience.

Don’t focus only on the current list price: While adjusting your prices based on your competitors’ product prices might seem like the best way to gain a competitive advantage, doing this constantly can be a wasteful use of your resources and you might compromise on your margins.

By observing the price trends of your competitors, stock status, promotion status, and price index, you can make more informed and effective pricing decisions. For example, if your competitor is offering a lower price but is out of stock then you don’t have to bother reducing your prices.

Respond promptly to competitive advantage: the key to making the most of your competitor monitoring efforts is responding to changes in competitor behaviour promptly while the competitive advantage is still relevant.

The way to achieve this is by building a team dedicated to competitor monitoring and empowering them with the power to make decisions and act quickly. While this might seem like an additional expense, not doing this will mean not making the most of valuable insights gained from your competitor price monitoring efforts.

Stay alert for new products: Make sure you are keeping an eye on your competitors for new launches, restocking, and pre-orders. While your products may be unique and niche today, your competitor might catch up tomorrow. If they do, it is important that you are aware of it as early as possible.

You can do this by setting up product rematching, where your competitor price monitoring tool is crawling the web at regular intervals for products similar to yours. Product rematching can be the most costly and time-consuming aspect of competitor monitoring. So it is important to prioritise the more price-sensitive products here.

Watch for broken, dead, or obsolete links: Broken links are the bane of any competitor monitoring tool. If you are Monitoring product A from competitor A and you notice that product A is out of stock, it is important to check if competitor A has listed his new stocks in a new link so that your pricing decision is based on an obsolete or broken link. Let’s not forget the resources spent on tracking a broken or obsolete link.

Therefore it is crucial to divert a part of your competitor monitoring efforts to ensure that product links are constantly checked and verified to make sure it’s relevant and current.

Optimise campaigns based on competitor intelligence: Competitor monitoring can be your best friend if you’re running product ads on marketplaces, platforms, and services like google shopping. With over 60% of customer purchase decisions are made with price as a primary factor, pricing will be an important factor in your promotional strategy too.

Through competitor monitoring, you can bid higher on products where you see a competitive price advantage to increase your return on ad spend and reduce or withdraw bids on products where you do not have a competitive advantage.

Competitors’ customer reviews are a goldmine of information and inspiration: 55% of customers look at online reviews and recommendations before making their purchase. And if your customers are doing it, you definitely should be doing it too. Furthermore, when you can not find a competitive price advantage, reviews will help you gain a competitive edge in other aspects of competitor behaviour.

Product reviews not only give you information about the performance of your competitors’ products, but also their perception, customer expectations, and the competitors’ shortcomings that you can capitalise on.

At Pricechecker, we help our customers make the most of their investment but help our customers set up our competitor price monitoring tool in such a way that they can make the most of their investment. We will help you identify your true competitors, gauge the price sensitivity of your products, and track and rematch based on it so you get valuable insights in place of a myriad of data.