Crayon is a competitor analysis platform offering some powerful competitive analysis tools with which to examine your competitor’s activities online.

Crayon Looks Great At First Sight but all is not what it seems

It’s powerful, has lots of features and I was quite excited to find it because, when you consider just how important it is to know what your competitors are up to, there are not many effective tools to help you to find out. I signed up for the free account and started to test it, excited about my new discovery.

My excitement, however, subsided quite quickly when I tried Crayon out with some of my live client site’s competitors. I tried one after another, some big, some small, not one of them registered on Crayon. Whether it’s just “.uk blindness” (common with US-based services), or not, I don’t know. All I know is that I couldn’t analyse sweet FA about any of them.

So, for the purpose of writing this introduction I used a few big sites that, surprise surprise, Crayon seemed to know plenty about – trouble is, so does everyone else and they don’t want to charge $100 per company per month, which Crayon does (although they do have a limited free account on offer).

Competitive analysis is a major part of any serious digital marketing strategy and there is a shortage of really good, affordable tools out there so I was keen to take a closer look at Crayon.

This is starting to look like a service that has been well designed and carefully thought out. The data it provides is exactly what businesses need to keep their noses in front of the opposition. A great idea let down by limitations in the implementation, as far as I can see. With a more comprehensive coverage of smaller yet still important sites this could really be a winner.

I wish I could use it but, like most small marketing agencies, my client list comprises of SME’s which, on my tests so far, seem to be flying below Crayon’s radar.

Shame.

Nevertheless, I do suggest that you give it a try for yourself – you may have more luck than I did and operate in a sector that Crayon have noticed. Let me know how you get on.

Crayon Pricing

As I said before, there is a free acount that you can use to test it out and I suggest that you do that – it might be right up your street. If it is, however, and you decide to install it into your business you’ll find the costs start to ramp up – it’s a $100 per competitor per month which could soon start to rack up if you are in a competitive industry.

They also want to bill you up-front annually so get ready for a hefty bill if you jump onboard – which also costs you an addition $50 “setup” fee.