As an entrepreneur or marketer, how do you answer important questions like…

“What are customers saying online about my product?”

“What do people do when they’re considering buying products like mine?”

“What marketing strategies are working for other companies in the industry?”

…And more, without spending a bunch of money? Whether you’re a scrappy entrepreneur on a shoestring budget, or you work for an established business and you just happen to like free stuff (who doesn’t?), you can gain valuable insights about your market and competitors just using free tools. In this article, I’ll show you 5 of those tools. I’ll be using the beauty subscription site Birchbox as an example company to show you how each tool is used. Also, thanks to Julian Cole and Amber Horsburgh, as much of the inspiration for this article comes from their awesome SlideShare presentation.

Tool #1: SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a web measurement and competitive intelligence tool built by SimilarGroup. Type in a domain and SimilarWeb will give you the site’s website traffic, geographic ranking, main referring websites, similar websites (of course), and more. There’s both a free and Pro/Paid version of SimilarWeb available.

Using our example of Birchbox, we can use the free version of SimilarWeb to get insights on the site’s desktop traffic. According to SimilarWeb, Birchbox received about 2.8 Million estimated visitors in June 2014:

There’s data on the geographic location of Birchbox’s visitors, most of whom come from the United States:

There’s Top Referring Sites and Top Destination Sites. Curious that it’s showing Indeed.com, the job listing site, as the top referring site, though searching Google results for Indeed postings that feature Birchbox turns up 6,630 results as of this writing.

There’s Search Traffic and keywords, including organic and paid keywords. SimilarWeb shows some of Birchbox’s most popular organic keywords as “Birchbox Careers” and “Birchbox Jobs”, which, if accurate, might explain why Indeed.com showed up as a major referral site:

SimilarWeb’s Social Traffic analysis tool shows most of Birchbox’s social traffic coming from Facebook, followed by Twitter:

There’s Display Advertising, showing most of Birchbox’s display traffic coming from Pandora.com, with Google’s Display network as the top ad network:

Also, because SimilarWeb is integrated with WhatRunsWhere, you can even use it to check out what a site’s display ads look like (click the “Show The Ads” button like in screenshot above), which could be useful for researching a competitor’s ads:

There’s a section for Audience Interests and Also Visited Websites. For Birchbox, SimilarWeb lists obvious broad interest categories like Beauty and Shopping. I’m curious as to whether Business and Industry showing up as an interest category indicates that a chunk of Birchbox visitors are actually very interested in business and industry, or whether that reflects referrals to Birchbox coming from articles written about the company in online business publications. Also, I’m guessing that Addictions might have more to do with topics like “makeup addiction” rather than an interest in the broad category of addictions. There’s also a topic tag cloud that includes relevant topics like “beauty products”, “makeover” and “beauty tips”:

And then there’s a Similar Sites section, which for Birchbox turns up other beauty-related sites and retailers like Ipsy and Sodashi:

All in all, SimilarWeb is an easy to use tool that you can use to quickly gain some basic competitive intelligence insights on other websites. The free version can serve as a decent starting point for analyzing competing websites before diving into more in-depth research.

Tool #2: Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to analyze trends in Google search data. Searching Google Trends for the term “Birchbox” yields data on the site’s interest over time, as indicated by Google search volume. The chart shows search interest in Birchbox rising steadily from around 2011, with a big jump in 2013, then dipping back somewhat after the holiday season:

We can also view Birchbox’s regional interest (Most searches are coming from the United States, followed by France) and related search terms (Birchbox code, Ipsy, Birchbox reviews, etc.):

Google Trends is great for getting a general idea of the popularity of a search term over time, so you can use it to research and compare brands or topics related to your market.

Tool #3: Think With Google

Think With Google is another super-useful Google tool you can use for research and market insights. It includes tools like Brand Impressions, Case Studies and more.

Using Think With Google, we can find data on brand impressions for a particular brand (As of this writing, Brand Impressions are located under “Products & Tools” on the top navigation bar, then select “Planning Tools” from the dropdown menu, then scroll down and choose “Brand Impressions” on the “Planning Tools” section):

For our example, typing “Birchbox” in the brand name search box will turn up Google’s brand impressions data for the site. This includes popular Youtube videos, Google Images results, graphs of Youtube and Google+ comments and views over a specific time period.

Think With Google also provides free research studies and reports that provide insights into online purchase behavior and other useful topics. You can find these by selecting the industry of your choice from the “Industries” tab on the navigation bar on the Think With Google homepage, or by using the search bar in the top right corner of the homepage to search by keyword. Birchbox offers beauty products, and a keyword search of Think With Google for the term “beauty” turns up several case studies, statistics and other helpful research on how customers shop online for beauty products:

Tool #4: Topsy

Topsy is a social media analytics tool that allows you to see what people are saying on Twitter about a brand, topic or product.

Searching Topsy for Birchbox brings up the screen below. As of this writing, most Tweets showing up are from media outlets covering the opening of Birchbox’s first brick-and-mortar store. The graph in the screenshot below shows Tweet trends for Birchbox over the past 30 days, with Tweets spiking in response to the launch of the new physical store:

Tool #5: Twitter Advanced Search

Similar to Topsy, you can use Twitter Advanced Search to search for Tweets in near real-time around brand or product mentions. As with Topsy, most of the Tweets about Birchbox as of this writing are about the new physical store. Twitter Advanced Search also allows you to filter your search by a specific date range, specific users, by location, by hashtag and more, which you can use to gain insights into your company or a competitor’s brand.

So there you have it! 5 Free tools that you can use to gain insights about your customers and competition. It’s a great time to be a marketer or entrepreneur because we have instant access to the kind of data for free today that would’ve cost companies thousands of dollars a couple of decades ago. This whole internet thing is kind of awesome sometimes.