Competitors: You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.
Even if you disdain the idea of competition, you can't escape the fact that competitor tracking is essential for any ecommerce brand’s success.
After all, good brands work hard to get their creative juices flowing but smart ecommerce brands cut the “learning curve” by directly learning from their competitors.
Plug into the best competitor analysis tools and you’ll have a wealth of information that’ll help you win. You'll set out with the intention to dominate with information, data, knowledge, and a marketing setup that’s proactive (not reactive).
In this article, I'll talk about the five best tools you can use to upgrade your competitor analysis for ecommerce. Let's dive in!
5 Tools for Analyzing Your Ecommerce Competitors
- Things you can you track on your e-commerce competitors
- Why is it better to do competitor tracking on a single platform?
- 5 Best Competitor Analysis Tools
- Panoramata
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Builtwith
- Your competitor's website
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Which tool is best for competitor analysis?
- How to do competitor analysis in eCommerce?
Things you can you track on your ecommerce competitors
Tools have become advanced and there’s now a plethora of information you can spy on your ecommerce competitors.
With the right software, you can get a full picture of their marketing strategy. The pieces that make up this strategy include email marketing, advertising, marketing stack, landing pages, and SEO.
Panoramata helps you improve marketing performance with better creatives, stunning ads, and highly-effective email marketing.
Other tools also monitor Google ads, keywords they rank for, social media content and schedules, backlinks, organic traffic, and ratings.
Here are some of the best tools for competitor analysis:
- Panoramata
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Builtwith
- Their own website!
Why is it better to do competitor tracking on a single platform?
Competitor tracking becomes more convenient when you can track all these marketing pieces in one platform. You only need to sign in once and the information you need is laid out for you, a click away.
It also keeps your workflow organized and is ideal if you’re collaborating with a marketing team. Your efforts will be under one platform so sharing ideas will be seamless.
5 Best Competitor Analysis Tools
Panoramata
Panoramata helps you improve marketing performance with better creatives, stunning ads, and highly-effective email marketing.
It’s primarily a competitor tracking tool that also doubles up as a multi-pronged inspiration board.
You can access any brand and get straight to the brand’s profile along with the respective brand’s marketing assets (including ads, email campaigns, marketing journeys, sales funnels, and landing pages).
Get instant access to the marketing stack in use for each brand, specifics about campaigns (frequency of emails, type of emails, subject lines used for emails), and more.
Sorted by industry, brand type, and more, you don’t have to follow 100+ different brands individually (logging in, checking out, subscribing to their emails, or following brand ads everywhere).
Semrush
Semrush has for a long time now been one admirable Swiss army knife when it comes to SEM, SEO, ads, and social media.
With more than 17+ tools rolled into a single platform, Semrush is perfect for
- SEO audits
- Keyword research
- Content creation (along with it’s “opportunities analysis”, SEO writing assistant, and the “Keyword Magic tool”
- Backlinking analysis and finding linking opportunities for SEO
- On-page SEO and finding opportunities with content strategy that you’d miss otherwise,
- Social media monitoring, social media tracking, and social media posting (on schedule).
- Ad tracking for any website (find out what kind of ads other businesses run)
- Competitive analysis (across the board) -- for ads, content, SEO, marketing strategy, ads on Google, and more.
Ahrefs
While Semrush takes an “all-in-one” approach to marketing and competitor tracking, Ahrefs is another popular tool that focuses squarely on content marketing and SEO with tools such as:
- A high-level dashboard of how your site (or other sites you are tracking) are doing, SEO-wise.
- SiteExplorer (research competitor backlinks and site profiles)
- Keyword Explorer (find winning keywords from their super-large database)
- Site audits (scan your website -- or other websites -- to see how well they do with their SEO)
- Rank Tracker (track ranking on search engines), and
- Content Explorer (find content ideas and opportunities to do well with content marketing)
Builtwith
Have you ever wondered what platform your competitors are using to host and manage their ecommerce site? Would you like to know if they have their Facebook Pixel (and other tracking pixels) on, and firing? How about the exact stack of marketing and tools your competitors use?
Learn all of that -- and more -- with Builtwith.
Builtwith is the “technology lookup” resource and it has been instrumental in letting anyone know the exact tools, hosting platforms, advertising platforms, and anything else connected with each website.
Using Builtwith, you’ll get a clear view of what’s connected to your competitor’s website -- the platform they use (such as Shopify or WordPress), the ad platforms they are on (Facebook? Twitter?), tracking scripts in use, and more.
You'll also get that info on Panoramata as well!
Your competitor's website
Don't overlook this crucial "tool" for competitive analysis: your competitor's website. Though technically it's not a tool, it costs nothing to view and holds a wealth of information you can use to your advantage.
Look at your competitor's homepage, product pages, and about page. See how they position themselves and their USP. Observe their CTAs and product descriptions.
If you can, take a look at their landing pages and the ads connected with them. With a sharp eye, you can amass a lot of data you can use for competitive analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which tool is best for competitor analysis?
The best competitor analysis tools include Panoramata, Semrush, Ahrefs, and BuiltWith.
How to do competitor analysis in eCommerce?
To conduct a competitor analysis as an ecommerce brand, you first have to identify your objectives and competitors, whether direct or indirect. Then, you can use competitor analysis tools to aid you in your research.
