Want to know exactly what your competitors are doing online? Well, there’s no shortage of tools on the market. Follow is one of the swankier releases I’ve seen in a while.

Better yet, it’s free.

Many will be familiar with the team behind Follow. It’s led by Wes Mahler, Nana Gilbert-Baffoe and co; the same guys that brought you the fiercely popular Tracking202 software, a tool that has been worth millions of optimised dollars to the affiliate industry.

It was this proven track record of delivering awesome products that caused my ears to perk when the launch announcement went out yesterday.

Follow straps on to your browser and aggregates data from a number of trusted sources, including analysis powerhouses WhatRunsWhere and MixRank. It’s available across all of the major browsers and can be installed, for free, in about 37 seconds.

Once you have Follow installed, you will notice a green F in your browser that can be used to bust open a sidebar full of useful metrics and analysis.

Everything you need is contained within the sidebar…

Analysis includes:

• Compete ranking
• Alexa trends
• High volume keywords
• SEM spend
• PPC competitors
• Ad networks used
• Top countries advertised in
• Associated affiliate offers
• Known landing pages
• Top ad placements
• Banners used
• Text ads used
• Quantcast demographics
• Linked Twitter accounts and recent tweets
• Reverse IP lookup
• WHOIS information

That’s a real clusterfrazzle of potentially useful information, particularly for affiliates who are building assets over the long haul in a competitive space.

One of my favourite features is the affiliate offer finder.

Follow scans through a collection of networks to see if the website you’re viewing has affiliate offers available. If so, it tells you where to find them, and what payouts you can expect. This is a really handy feature. All those times you’ve stumbled across a cool service and thought, “Holy shit, this product looks half decent. If I wasn’t such a CPA scumbag, I’d promote it! But that would involve research…”

Well, now you can beat procrastination stations with one click.

Follow is operating in a crowded space, there’s no doubt about that. Barely a week goes by where I’m not asked to check out the latest spying tool. Most of them are functional, but they gather dust fast. What I like about Follow is the speed and ease-of-access to the data.

It’s speasy.

It ain’t easy being speasy (it ain’t easy being white).

If, like most affiliates, you enjoy keeping your nose wedged firmly in the competition’s business, Follow will make a nice addition to your toolbar. Snap it up.