Competitive Insight Overview

Using the insight feature you are able to compare:

• Web traffic
• Blogs
• Tweets
• Facebook posts
• Google+ posts
• YouTube videos

Set Up Your Insight Competitors

Monitor up to ten competitors and compare your online presence.

1. Navigate to Inbound > Competitors
2. Click Setup in the header menu
3. Click Add Competitor
   
4. Enter your company website URL, click Submit.
   
5. Once Act-On pulls your information, a new window will open that shows your company name, website URL, blog URL, Twitter username, Facebook username, Google+ ID, and YouTube username
6. If the information could not be detected or Act-On guessed incorrectly, enter the correct values in each field and click Submit
   
   • Blogs – Enter the blog URL and click Submit
     • Act-On will validate whether the blog can be read for this feature (it must have an RSS feed)
     • If you see a drop-down menu, this will allow you to choose a specific blog URL
   • Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube – Enter usernames (no URL necessary)
   • Google+ – Enter the ID
7. Repeat this process for each competitor you wish to monitor
8. Click and drag a competitor to position and re-position
   

Once you've entered the data for your company and your competitors, you can view results right away. Click on Inbound > Competitors and choose Website, Blog, Social Media, or YouTube.

See and compare your number of inbound links with your competitors. Insights are provided using the website ranking site Alexa.com.

• Alexa will give your site a Local Rank and ​Global Rank rating to compare it to the sites of the competitors you have added
• Alexa uses multiple factors to rank sites, but it prioritizes overall web traffic
• For more information, see Alexa's About Us page

This section compares your blogging efforts to those of your competitors, including:

• Frequency of posts
• Number of comments 

At the bottom of this page, you'll see blog posts of all your tracked companies, by day.

You can quickly see trending topics and the numbers of responses for each post.

The number of posts and time period of posts displayed will depend on the information available in each company's RSS feed for their blog, so these may vary from company to company.

On this page, tabs for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are located across the top. Click to see statistics, including amplification (the number of times your post is shared by the people you reach directly) and the number of comments.

Recent posts are displayed at the bottom of this page. Note that you can view all the companies you track, or look at results company by company. The default is 'By All Companies'. You can also view results by Timeline, Most Likes or Most Comments. Timeline is the default.

The YouTube Competitive Insights section compares the amount of content available on your YouTube channel, as well as the overall responses in terms of subscribers, views, number of ratings, average ratings, comments, favorites, and social amplification from sharing on Twitter, and Facebook.

Recent videos posted and the number of responses around each individual video, are also displayed.

1. Navigate to the competitors tab in Act-On, click Inbound > Competitors.
2. Choose Setup > Add Competitor
3. Click Click here
   
4. Enter your website domain, click Submit
   
5. If you already have a custom URL it is likely that Act-On will pre-populate the correct URL. If this is the case hit submit and you should be good to go.
   

If you don't have a YouTube Custom URL, you can create one if you meet the following requirements from YouTube:

• 500 or more subscribers
• Channels is at least 30 days old
• Channel has uploaded a photo for the channel icon
• Channel has uploaded channel art

If you already have a Custom URL:

1. Click Inbound > Competitors, and choose Setup > Add Competitor.
2. Add your Youtube username.
3. Click Submit.