Track New Competitors In Marketing Using ScrapingDog

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• How the Automation Works
• Key Components
• Benefits of This Workflow
• Setup Guide
• Troubleshooting
• Conclusion
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

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Introduction

In any competitive industry, being aware of new players is critical for staying ahead. Manually searching for new competitors is unreliable and time-consuming. This n8n workflow provides an automated solution to monitor the market, identify emerging competitors, and analyze their initial footprint, ensuring you're never caught by surprise.

By combining n8n's scheduling with ScrapingDog's powerful search engine scraping and AI for analysis, you can build a vigilant, automated eye on your market.

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How the Automation Works

1. Scheduled Search: The workflow runs on a schedule (e.g., weekly or monthly) and uses ScrapingDog to perform a Google search for your target keywords.
2. Scrape and Extract: It scrapes the top search results and extracts the URLs of the ranking pages.
3. Identify New Domains: The workflow compares the list of currently ranking domains against a historical list stored in a Google Sheet or database. Any domain that has not been seen before is flagged as a potential new competitor.
4. AI-Powered Analysis: For each new domain, the workflow can visit the website, scrape its content, and use an AI model to summarize the company's products, services, and value proposition.
5. Log and Alert: New competitors and their AI-generated summaries are logged in a central Google Sheet. Optionally, an alert can be sent to your team via email or Slack to notify them of a new market entrant.

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Key Components

Component	Function
n8n	Automates and orchestrates the entire competitor tracking process.
ScrapingDog	Performs the Google search and scrapes the results pages.
AI (e.g., GPT-4)	Analyzes the new competitor's website to summarize their business.
Google Sheets	Stores the historical list of domains and logs new competitors.
Notification Service	(Optional) Sends alerts about new competitors.

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Benefits of This Workflow

• Proactive Competitor Discovery: Be the first to know when a new competitor enters your space.
• Automate Tedious Monitoring: Set it up once and let it run automatically, saving countless hours of manual searching.
• Quick Insights: Get an immediate, AI-generated summary of a new competitor's business without having to do the research yourself.
• Strategic Advantage: Use this information to quickly adapt your own marketing and product strategies.

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Setup Guide

1. Import the Workflow: Start by importing the workflow's JSON file into your n8n instance.
2. Configure Credentials: Add your API keys for ScrapingDog and your chosen AI service into the n8n credential manager.
3. Set Up Google Sheet: Create a Google Sheet to serve as your database of known domains.
4. Define Keywords: In the workflow, specify the search keywords you want to monitor. These should be the terms your customers would use to find solutions like yours.
5. Customize AI Prompts: Tailor the AI prompt to extract the specific information you want to know about new competitors (e.g., "Summarize this company's main product and pricing").
6. Activate and Monitor: Activate the workflow. On its first run, it will populate your database. On subsequent runs, it will identify and analyze new entrants.

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Troubleshooting

• Blocked Scraping Attempts: Search engines can be difficult to scrape. ScrapingDog is designed to handle this, but if you encounter issues, ensure you are using their Google Search API endpoint and not just a generic web scraper.
• Irrelevant "New" Competitors: Your search may pick up directories or blogs. Refine your workflow's logic to filter out irrelevant domains (e.g., by ignoring domains containing "youtube.com" or "wikipedia.org").
• Poor AI Summaries: If the AI summaries are weak, the scraper might not be extracting the right content from the competitor's site. Ensure you are scraping the "About Us" or "Products" page for the best results.

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Conclusion

This automated competitor tracking workflow is an essential tool for any serious marketer or business strategist. It provides a reliable, efficient way to keep a pulse on your market, giving you the information you need to stay competitive in a dynamic landscape.

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