Whether you’re logged in or not, anyone can now publicly view our site overview reports. Previously, you had to be logged in to view these reports and when you wanted to share them, they could only be shared with other registered users. Now, anyone can view any of our overview reports. They’re also super easy to share!

Public Report URLs

You can now link to any of our site overviews by using the following url address structure, http://follow.net/domains/{domain_name}. Replace {domain_name} with your own. Here are a few examples.

• http://follow.net/domains/airbnb.com
• http://follow.net/domains/creditreport.com
• http://follow.net/domains/audible.com
• http://follow.net/domains/groupon.com

You may notice that when use the links above, you’ll actually be forwarded to our app with a slightly different url structure. You may also copy this end destination URL for the report you’re viewing on and share that, however, we highly recommend using the link structure above.  It’s much cleaner and we’ll always support them. When you share a report, we’ll provide you with these cleaner links so you don’t have to ever think about it.

Sharing Reports

We’ve made it easy to share our reports.  While you’re on any screen, click on the our new share button, located in the top-right corner of every screen. A share modal will pop up which will allow you to copy the URL address for the public report, share it directly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or send an email to your friend.  See our animated GIF below.

Long time Follow users might remember that our old share button simply brought up your referral link and information about our referral program. The new share button brings up a different modal, it allows you to share the actual page you’re viewing.  This is how a share button should work.

If you’re wondering how you now refer friends and still get credit for it, keep reading.

Earn Free Upgrades & Money By Referring Others

If you’re logged into Follow and share a report, your referral tracking code will automatically be added to the report URLs you share. 

While logged in, when you click on the share button you’ll see the query parameter “ref” added to the end of the url.  It’ll look something like this – http://follow.net/domains/airbnb.com?ref={user_id}.  If you do not wish to have your referral code included or shown when you share a report, you can simply remove ?ref={user_id} from the url, like this – http://follow.net/domains/airbnb.com.

We’ve made our referral process as simple as possible. You don’t have to think about it.  When you share a report, if you’re logged in, we’ll automatically append your referral tracking id to it. You’ll automatically get credit if someone signs up after viewing a public report you shared.  For example, if you’re writing about a domain on your blog and want to share a link with all of your readers, any of your viewers who view our public reports and sign up, you’ll get credit for them. 

For those who wish to see our old refer a friend screen, it still exists.  You can access that by going to: User Settings > Refer a Friend.  The Refer a Friend screen will also show you detailed information about your referrals & rewards.

Search Directly from our Homepage

You can now also search for a domain directly from our homepage.  Want to share a report with a friend but don’t have access to your computer? Just tell them to visit our homepage, follow.net and perform a search directly from the website.

Overview Lookup Limit

Users who access our public reports will be limited by the number of lookups they can perform. To perform more lookups, you can sign up for a free account which will allow you to perform more lookups or upgrade to a paid account to get even more.

Use Follow for your Quick, High Level Site Overviews

We want to be your go to source for looking up high level competitive intelligence website data! If you’re writing a blog post about a domain and want to share competitive intelligence data with your readers, give them more information by sharing a link to our public reports!  If you’re creating an online advertising campaign with your team, show your team members what ad creatives are working for your competitors by sharing our reports with them. Thinking about starting a new company with your friends? View reports on other companies in your industry of interest and share them with your future co-founders.

If you want a quick snapshot of how a domain engages and acquires their users online, use Follow! If you want to go deep into any specific vertical like; SEO, SEM, Display Advertising or any other vertical, we recommend signing up with our partners who specialize in those specific datasets.

View & Share our Public Reports now!

Our public reports are now available. See them at follow.net and start sharing them with your friends today!

Want to know which websites refer the most visitors to your competitors? Now you can find out using our new incoming referral data, powered by Compete. This new report will allow you to see any website’s top 25 referring domains. It will tell you the percentage of traffic and the exact number of monthly visitors it receives from each referring domain.

It’s useful to understand which websites are referring the most visitors to your competitors. You are likely to find that there are a few websites delivering most of the traffic to your competitors. If you’re not advertising on those websites, you might want to start doing so.

Here’s an example report for the website spokeo.com, a people search website. They receive 1.69% of their traffic from visitors who came directly to their website and were not referred by another website. 46.88% of their visitors arrived from google.com, 6.34% from whitepages.com and 4.71% from search.google.com.  If you were competing with them in the people search business, advertising on Google Search, the White Pages site & Yahoo Search would probably be a very wise idea.

What websites are referring the most visitors to your competitors? 

Find out today!  Our referral data is now available to all of our paid users.  Not a paid user yet? Upgrade to Follow Pro today!

We’ve added one of our most requested features to Follow, site demographics. We’ve partner up with Compete to provide you with this data.  For paid users, you can now see the following demographic data for almost any website; genders, ages & income ranges.

Advertisers will find our demographic data particularly useful. Knowing the demographic data about a site you’re interested in advertising on can help you determine whether or not it’s a good ad placement.   For example, if you’re selling expensive yacht vacations, you’ll likely only want to focus your advertising on sites which have higher income visitors.

If you’re selling women’s shoes, you’ll likely only want to advertise on sites with a larger female audience. Wasting your ad impressions on men probably wouldn’t be a good idea. If you’re marketing retirement homes for seniors, you’ll likely want to advertise on sites that have an older audience.  Wasting your ad impressions on young kids is probably not a wise use of your ad dollars. You can also understand what your competitor’s demographics are, which may help you better understand what demographics you might want to be targeting too. These are just a few examples of how you can use demographic data.

Our demographic data is now available to all our of paid users.  Want access to our new demographic data? Upgrade to Follow Pro today!

 

Free and paid account owners are now limited by the number of domain overview lookups they can perform each month.

Free users will be able to look up 50 domains each month.  This limit can be increased by referring more friends (5 extra look ups a month per friend) or by upgrading to a paid account (500 – 5,000 extra lookups a month). Your quota will only be deducted from when you look up unique domains.  If you performed several lookups on the same domain, you’d only be deducted once for it.

If you have a shared portfolio, whichever member that is currently using your portfolio, when they perform overview lookups, your quota will be deducted from.  If you’re a business, sign up for a paid account to share the upgraded account benefits with everyone on the team. You can invite an unlimited number of co-workers.

Notice to Firefox users: You may be the first to run out of quota because our Firefox sidebar extension stays open while you navigate the web, this will deduct a lot of overview quotas.  If you accidentally run out because you didn’t know we were limiting the overview quota, please contact us, we can reset it, we already know which accounts may have this issue.

Your monthly quota resets on the day of the month you signed up or upgraded to a paid account.  To check your quota, view our usage widget — which can be found at the bottom of the left side bar once you’re logged into our application.  This shows the portfolio owner’s usage.  A user may have several portfolios, the usage is shared among all of them.  If you’re a member of another user’s portfolio, when you view the portfolio’s usage, you’ll be viewing their account usage.

 

We are incredibly excited to announce our newest addition to Follow today.  We’ve been working on this feature for a very long time and we are now finally ready to release it to the world.

When we first started Follow almost a year ago, we didn’t just want to copy everyone else in our industry.  We wanted to provide a completely new experience for gathering competitive site information. The old experience that everyone is familiar goes something like this. When you want to look up information about a particular website, you have to perform lookup reports on several different competitive research sites & services.

These sites & services can show you a ton of information about any particular competitive piece of information you want.  They do what they’re suppose to do and they work really well.  At Follow, we’ve also provided this by integrating with several of these companies to provide you the ability to quickly lookup information about any site.

We’ve already created one of the fastest competitive tools ever to hit the market.  What used to take a lot of time, our software can pull competitive information about any site across several different marketing channels in seconds.  But we don’t want to stop there, we’re going to make it even better.

We believe you shouldn’t have to visit our site whenever you want to know what your competitor is doing, you should just be notified when any of the sites you’re following does anything new.   It can become a real hassle when you have several sites you want to pull up competitive information for on a regular basis.  It takes up a lot of time and it becomes even more tedious when you need to lookup the same site across several competitive research tools over and over again.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone just told you every-time any of the sites you wanted to know about did something new online without having to check yourself?   We thought so, so we decided to build it.  It’s called the Follow News Feed.  I think you’re going to absolutely love it.  It’s a competitive intelligence news feed that reports back to you whenever any of your competitors do anything new online.  Here’s how it works:

1) Viewing a site’s news feed:

When you lookup a site using Follow, you’ll now notice a new tab that says “Newsfeed.” Click this tab to load up the news feed for that particular site.  This news feed will show you an activity log of everything that site has done, across every marketing channel we monitor.

We only start tracking data for domains from the date that they were first followed by someone.  So if no one has followed it before we won’t have any data.  If you load up a site’s news feed that’s never been followed you’ll be prompted to follow it if you’re interested in the data.  If we already have the data, the news feed data will show and you won’t have to follow it to see it.  However, if you’ll want to know if that site does anything new in the future, you’ll want to follow it.  If you don’t follow it, you won’t receive notifications about what they do in the future.

2) Viewing a news feed for several sites at once

You can also view a news feed that shows all the activity for several sites at once.   This can only be done if you’ve followed the domains already.  To view a news feed that shows several domains at once, go to our left sidebar and click on either “all domains” or a “tag” you’ve created.  Once you do that we’ll show you a news feed for every site in the tag group you’ve selected, or all of your domains if you selected that option.

This is great if you want to see all of the activity for a specific group of websites in one location.  For instance, let’s say you are selling credit reports online.  You may have a group of websites you’ve followed and tagged with the world “Credit Report.”   Now you can see what all of them are doing by clicking on the “Credit Report” tag you’ve created.

3) Filtering the news feed story types:

Our news feeds can show you a variety of different stories for any particular website because we monitor several different marketing channels.   We have news feed stories related to;  search marketing, display advertising, affiliate activity, recent blog posts, social media activity & more.

If you only want to view a particular group of stories at once, you may do so by selecting a filter.  You can select one, or several filters at the same time.  For example, if you only want to see what a site does with their social media campaigns, simply filter the news feed by Twitter and Facebook stories only.  Now you’ll only see stories related to Facebook and Twitter, you won’t be shown anything else.

4) Our news feed is fully responsive:

You can view our news feed across all of our different views; our toolbars, desktop and mobile sites.  We’ve spent an incredible amount of time making this work all together. We’re excited to say wherever you are & however you’re using Follow, you’ll be able to access our news feeds.

4) You’ll receive email notifications about the sites you’ve followed:

You’ll now receive email notifications for every site you’ve followed.  New stories about the websites you followed will be emailed to you, by default on a daily basis.  You may change your email preferences to receive no emails, daily emails or weekly emails.

You can access your email notification settings by clicking on your name in our left-sidebar, and then the “My Notifications” link.  Each domain will have it’s own notifications setting.  We send out an email for each domain.  So if you’re following 10 different domains, and each of those domains has activity every day, you’ll receive 10 emails a day.  One for each domain you’ve followed.

6) Your team can receive notifications too:

If you work with several people and they also need to know what your competitors are doing, they can receive the news feed stories too.  To do this, simply share your Follow portfolio with them.  A shared portfolio allows everyone who has joined to have access to the same information that you do. Everyone in the shared portfolio can see, follow and unfollow domains in that portfolio.

Everyone also receives their own email notifications for every domain that’s been followed in the shared portfolio.  Each member manages their own email notification settings.  You can have as many portfolios as you like. Many users have personal portfolios and another for a company that they share with co-workers.

That’s everything!  See it for yourself now, it’s live!

Our news feed is available now!   If you’ve followed any domains previously you can now see a news feed that shows all of their activity.  Simply login to app.follow.net and you’ll see all of the stories immediately once you login.  We’ve been tracking them since the day you’ve followed them!

PS: Please do not mark all of our new emails as spam when you start receiving our news feed emails.  We have made it incredibly easy to update your notification settings. If you’re receiving to many emails change your email notification settings to weekly, or disable it all together if you want to receive none.

PSS: What are you waiting for?  Check out the new Follow News Feed here from your phone or your computer now!