• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, December 5, 2016

As Snapchat continues its ascent and becomes increasingly significant to brands, Snaplytics, a software as a service company (SaaS) on Monday debuted an insights tool that offers competitor analysis, so brands can research and assess what their rivals are doing on the platform and make decisions about their Snapchat campaigns.

The competitor analysis solution allows companies to survey any Snapchat account, observe the frequency with which that account posts stories and snaps, the duration of the updates, how the content is split between videos and images, as well as the duration and overall amount of time people have been engaged. Snaplytics already offers brand and influencer analytics.

Snaplytics said that prior to this type of competitor analysis, brands that wanted to follow their competitors on Snapchat needed to do it in real time, manually recording tone of voice, frequency, length, and more. If a brand has dozens of competitors, this type of manual process would be challenging.

“With the Snaplytics Competitor Analysis product, brands can easily access the information only by knowing the username of their competitors (i.e. a brand’s Snapchat handle) and Snaplytics does the rest of the work automatically,” Thomas Cilius, CEO and founder, Snaplytics told Real-Time Daily via email. Snaplytics’ Snapchat analytics dashboard examines data including open rates, completion rates, what screengrabs are taken, how many followers a campaign has, and more.

The company uses proprietary technology that doesn’t require public APIs. Ben & Jerry’s, Vodafone, and the City of Las Vegas are among Snaplytics’ clients.