On 22 August, Loop sent us an email.
Subject line: "10% off ENDS TONIGHT."
On 14 September, Loop sent us another one.
Subject line: "10% off ENDS TONIGHT."
Same words. Same offer. 23 days apart.
I'm not calling Loop liars. What happened is more useful than that, and it's the first of five reasons to spy on your competitors.
Now, about that word. Nothing below is secret. It came from an inbox, Google's ad library, a status page, a landing page and a traffic estimate. No logins, no tricks.
It's all public. Almost nobody reads it. (I made the longer case in do you need a tool if it's all public anyway?)
1. You find out which deadlines are real
Both "ENDS TONIGHT" emails were step three of the same little machine.
Day one: "Your cart's calling..." Day two: "10% off your order right now". Day five: "ENDS TONIGHT".
It started on 18 August. It started again on 10 September, less than an hour after Loop welcomed our address to its Archive sale list.
So the deadline is real. For that round. Then a new round starts, with a new tonight.
If you sell against Loop, that's worth knowing. You don't have to panic-match a 10% that "ends tonight". In our inbox, it came back.
2. You see what they keep paying for
Google publishes the ads an advertiser runs, with dates.
One of monday.com's search ads was first shown on 22 December 2022. When I looked on 16 October, Google said it was last shown on 15 October 2026. Almost four years.
Want to guess what it says?
"Monday.com - monday.com Login & Get Started."
No clever hook. A login link, under their own name.
My guess: you don't pay for your own name for four years unless you think someone else would take the spot. Either way, the ad a company never switches off tells you what it is sure of. (More on that in what they refuse to switch off.)
3. You get to read their best sales letter
We read 50 of Hears' live Meta ads in detail on 2 October. 18 of them sent the click to the same page.
The headline starts: "7 Reasons Why These Earplugs Are the Only Real Way to Sleep Through Snoring..." When I opened it on 16 October, a countdown at the top said "Ends on Sunday" over a Buy 2, Get 1 Free offer.
Two more ads go to a page called "I Tested Hears Earplugs So You Don't Have To". It reads like a review by a music writer. It lives on hears.com.
Look. Somebody at Hears knows what a sales letter is. And they pay to find out which one works.
You get to read the winner for free.
4. You see their bad days
Asana keeps a public status page. Credit to them, it's honest.
On 31 August it reads: "Asana full outage for some users (2 hours, 25% outage)." Two days later: "We are fully down for a subset of customers." From 31 August to 30 September I count six incidents, three of them marked major.
I'm not saying dance on their grave. Nobody switches tools over one bad afternoon.
But somebody who was already shopping? That afternoon they shop harder. If you sell against Asana, that's the week your comparison page has to be good. (More signals like this in how fast a SaaS rival ships.)
5. You find out if it's you or the weather
Say you run marketing at ClickUp. Similarweb estimates your visits fell 9.3% from July to September. Why?
So look next door. On the same estimate, Asana fell 5.8% and monday.com 3.8%.
Everybody fell, so part of it is the season. But ClickUp fell further than both, and that part is probably yours.
Honest warning: these are modelled estimates, not counts. Good for direction, not decimals. (How the estimates work.)
Your own analytics can't tell you any of this. They only see you.
So what do you do with it?
All of it was free to look at. The hard part is opening five tabs for every competitor, every couple of weeks, and keeping notes.
That's why I built Kvasano.
So here's my offer. Give me one competitor. We'll measure them against your own brand, counted the same way on both sides. Like the one you can see for monday.com against Asana and ClickUp.
It costs nothing. No card. No call. It's one measurement, not a subscription, so you see the numbers before you decide anything.
P.S. The free benchmark is one snapshot. It won't tell you when your competitor's "tonight" comes back. But it will show you where they're ahead, and that's where you start looking. Pick your competitor.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.