Framework of Competitor Analysis by Monitoring Information on the Web

Competitor Analysis (CA) is an important part of the strategic planning process. By spying every move of the competitors offers a company an advantageous position in decision making. With the advent of World-Wide-Web technology, many businesses extend their activities to the Internet platform, from online marketing to customer services, thereby left over traces of valuable information for competitor analysis. The scattered information can be collected from the Web for studying what the competitors are doing and what products and services they offer up-todate. In the past CA was conducted manually and it was a tedious process. The sources of such Web information are diversified and the contents are updated frequently too. It is therefore desirable to build an efficient and automated tool that gathers competitor information, monitors the updates and formulates them into useful competitor intelligence with minimum human intervention. Although many information retrieval and monitoring technologies have been developed, they are more for generally tracking changes and downloading the whole websites for offline browsing. In this paper, a framework of automated competitor analysis is proposed as a holistic solution. It is a Web monitoring tool that works for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The designs of the components and the operational challenges are discussed respectively.