Competitor site monitoring

BiH115

BiH115

Gif Guy
Joined
May 12, 2011
Messages
9,327
Hey all,

wasn't sure where exactly to post this kind of question. I'm trying to find a tool of some sorts, perhaps cost effective, that'll show what a potential competitor who visits my site is doing. Perhaps if they are looking at a certain product on the website, or just in general snooping around. I figured Google Analytics did something like this, but it may be that it is out of its reach as far as this kind of task goes.

Webtrends.com was used for a while but is there anything else out there?

Thanks.
 
how would you distinguish a competitor from any user on the internet?
 
if you knew the external IP's that they used you could possibly figure something out. Is the web site hosted internally or by a 3rd party?
 
Known IP range perhaps. If that is the case, you could pull logs from your server to see where they went. What server (i.e IIS, Apache) is hosting the site?
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
What's to stop them from browsing from a smart phone, proxy, home?
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Nothing. But this would at least give him something.

I know this sort of thing is possible based on ip. I was looking into some load balancers last year and I went to a companies website a few times in one week and then a few days later a salesman contacted me because he found where the ip address was owned and he called the main switch board and asked for IT.
 
Hm interesting things here, thanks guys. So it appears what I need is some kind of tool of some sort, that lets me take the IP's (that we already have from 'competitors') and have it show me where on the site they went? Am I getting a little futuristic here? I'm just curious how deep into this I can go. We just want to keep an eye on what others are doing on our site with the IP's we already have. Anything like that exist...? If not, just call me crazy and we'll end it there. :)
 
BiH115 said:
If not, just call me crazy and we'll end it there. :)
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I wouldn't call you crazy, I'd call you paranoid.
Who cares what your competitors are doing on your website. Oh no! My competitor is reading PUBLIC information that I am advertising to the entire internet!
What difference does it make if your "competitor" visits your product A page vs your product B page? Will what they do have any bearing on how many of product A and B you produce? I doubt it.
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
I wouldn't call you crazy, I'd call you paranoid.
Who cares what your competitors are doing on your website. Oh no! My competitor is reading PUBLIC information that I am advertising to the entire internet!
What difference does it make if your "competitor" visits your product A page vs your product B page? Will what they do have any bearing on how many of product A and B you produce? I doubt it.
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I was hoping something like this would get addressed. It's not my company, it's a clients company. They're exactly as you describe, paranoid, and possibly a little over-presumptuous. I was just seeing what option were available.
 
Why not just log page hits? On every single page load, create a record in a database with the page visited and the IP address. Pretty basic stuff.

I'd say this is more of a programming issue than a networking issue.
 
gangolfus said:
Why not just log page hits? On every single page load, create a record in a database with the page visited and the IP address. Pretty basic stuff.

I'd say this is more of a programming issue than a networking issue.
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This is not even a programming issue. Pretty much any common web server will log this information anyways. It would simply be a matter of extracting that information into a usable format.
 
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