If you’re wondering why your efforts to promote your products online have been in vain or why your competitors are running full steam ahead while you languish in their wake, you might want to look into competitor benchmarking.

It’s a must-do for any marketing team who wants to stay current, tap into opportunities, and boost revenue.

But what is ecommerce benchmarking and how do you do it?

In this article, we’ll talk about how to benchmark your competitors in just five steps. So easy peasy that you can get started today. 

Without further ado, let’s dive in, shall we?

What is competitive benchmarking?

Competitive benchmarking is the practice of comparing your company’s performance against other companies and the industry you belong to using specific metrics. 

These metrics (or benchmarks) include 

• Conversion rates
• Bounce rates
• Average order value
• Customer lifetime value
• Customer acquisition costs
• Revenue
• Search engine results
• Customer ratings

You can also compare strategies, products offered, and practices and see how you’re performing according to the standards your competitors have set. 

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6 Benefits of Competitor Benchmarking in Ecommerce

Competitor benchmarking is underrated in ecommerce. The benefits are greater than you think. Here are some of them.

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Adapt to changes and trends

Benchmarking gives you insights into trends in your industry, including innovations, changing customer preferences, and market changes. Through the process of benchmarking, you can spot opportunities to seize and threats before they become a problem. That way, you stay agile and pivot accordingly.

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See your brand’s position clearly

Want to check how you fare in the market compared to your competitors? Try benchmarking. By directly comparing your performance through metrics, you can see where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Areas you can check include website traffic, conversion rates, engagement rates, and spam scores.

Benchmarking doesn't mean you just pat yourself on the back when you pinpoint your strengths. Once opportunities are identified, you can think of how to improve.

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By systematically analyzing your rivals' strategies, performance metrics, and market positioning, you can gain valuable insights that inform and refine your own business strategy. 

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Create better campaigns

Benchmarking can unleash a well of creativity that you can use to create inspired campaigns. That's because when you analyze your competition's products, marketing campaigns, and other tactics, you find fresh ideas and best practices.

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Monitor competitors

Benchmarking provides a structured way to track competitors over time rather than relying on sporadic observations. Being consistent with tracking leads to a better understanding of long-term strategies.

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Maximize sales and revenue

Benchmarking can also lead to better sales because you can benchmark your products and identify gaps (products or deals your competitors are offering but you aren't).

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Avoid getting left behind

Business evolves rapidly and if you don't keep your ears tuned to the ground, you will get left behind.

‍Benchmarking helps you avoid that because you will be attuned to your competitors' activity, such as when they bring in a new technology like AR for virtual try-ons and the like. Then, you can assess if those changes are worth copying for your own business.

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How to select competitors to benchmark yourself against

Benchmarking is only as good as the competitor data you collect and the competitors you benchmark yourself against. Here's how to choose those competitors wisely.

Start with your direct competitors

Start by identifying direct competitors. These competitors have the same or similar target audiences, product offerings, and market size as your business. Hence, theyare your closest rivals and the best source of data.

For example, if you have a DTC swimwear brand, you need to focus on competitors who are also in DTC, as opposed to luxury brands and standard retailers.

Include aspirational competitors

Direct competitors are valuable but don't give you the full picture. That's why you alsoneed to benchmark so-called aspirational competitors—those slightly ahead of you in the market. These companies represent your ideal business. Look to them for inspiration.

For instance, a mid-sized SaaS company might analyze the marketing tactics of a larger, more established competitor in the same niche.

Consider indirect competitors as well

It’s also valuable to include indirect competitors in your analysis. These are businesses outside your immediate industry that target similar customer needs.

For example, a coffee shop might benchmark against a juice bar since both appeal to health-conscious consumers. Including these competitors broadens your perspective.

Ask yourself how difficult it will be to gather their data

Lastly, ensure that the competitors you select provide accessible and measurable data. This includes publicly available information, such as website traffic, social media activity, and customer reviews.

Tools like Panoramata can streamline this process by consolidating competitor data in one place, enabling you to benchmark efficiently. By carefully selecting a mix of direct, aspirational, and indirect competitors, you can create a comprehensive benchmarking strategy.

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How to Conduct Competitor Benchmarking

Step 1: Set goals and objectives

The first step in benchmarking your ecommerce competitors is to define your goals and objectives. 

Ask yourself what you want your brand to achieve through benchmarking. Make sure your objectives are clear. 

Examples of potential objectives include increasing newsletter signups or sales, improving performance or strategy, and having better processes. 

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Step 2: List down your competitors (direct or indirect)

Next, make a list of your competitors you want to benchmark yourself against. 

You might find the process of selecting competitors overwhelming or confusing. There are several ways to approach it. 

You can choose your direct competitors or your peers who are most similar to you and are going after the same target market. 

Alternatively, you can opt for bigger fish–the companies who are best in class in your industry–and use them as inspiration. 

On the other hand, you can also benchmark your brand against up-and-coming ecommerce companies. This helps you become aware of potential threats that can become bigger rivals in the future.    

Ensure you also look beyond direct competitors and consider those offering similar products or catering to the same demographic.

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Step 3: Choose your metrics

Now that you have your goals, objectives, and list of competitors, it’s time to determine the metrics you’ll measure in your benchmarking.

Examples of metrics you’ll want to track are:

• Website traffic
• Average organic traffic
• Market share of traffic
• Keyword rankings
• Social media followers
• Social media engagement
• Average ads published
• Average emails sent
• Spam score
• Email types sent
• Average price
• Total products

The metrics you track should be relevant to your goals. If you don’t know where to start, you should try benchmarking your competitor’s ads, emails, product prices, landing pages, and software. 

This gives you a holistic view of a brand’s performance and shows where you’re at relative to them.

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Benchmark ads

Gauge your competitors’ advertising performance using metrics like average ads published, ad volume, ad diversity (images or video), and unique copy.

Benchmark emails

To measure email performance, collect data on the average number of emails sent, spam scores, email types (promo, relational, product, launch, survey), and email size.

Benchmark prices

Research what products your competitors offer and how they price them. Track average prices and total products.

Observe their product categories, range, and pricing methods. Do they position their products as budget-friendly, luxury, or midrange? 

This information can help you adjust your pricing strategy. 

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Benchmark landing pages

You can also benchmark landing pages and the ads associated with these pages to see what your competitor’s funnel looks like. 

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Benchmark software

Lastly, it’s worth looking into the software your competitors use to run their website for additional information.

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Step 4: Choose your benchmarking tools and gather information

You have access to your brand’s metrics but the challenge is getting ahold of your competitors’ information. These metrics are confidential. 

Also, the process can be complex and time-consuming if you decide to gather data manually.  Nonetheless, you can research any available company reports online, as well as articles and press releases. 

SEO and social media metrics are readily available but to get a full view, you need to upgrade to paid tools.

Competitor benchmarking tools like Panoramata will streamline this step so you don’t have to collect all this information yourself. 

These tools also have the advantage of keeping your data in one place so you are more organized and can access and analyze them easily.

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Step 5:  Analyze results and implement

Finally, it’s time to analyze the data you’ve collected by comparing your information to that of your competitors side by side. You can use competitor analysis and benchmarking tools like Panoramata to automate this. 

You can then implement the insights you’ve obtained from the reports. 

Make sure to track and benchmark regularly to keep your data fresh. Repeat the benchmarking process as needed.

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Main Metrics Things to Look For When Competitor Benchmarking and How to Source Data

Using some key metrics to benchmark against competitors, you can prevent yourself from drifting into the ‘Amazon forest’ equivalent of the web. 

Knowing what to look for when you focus on competitive analytics is just as important as competitive analytics itself, the tools you use for competitive analysis, and the motivation for competitor research. 
Let’s say you pick up a few tools like Panoramata, Similarweb, Semrush, and many others. What exactly do you look out for? 

Let’s explore the main metrics, and things to look for to benchmark yourself against your competition: 

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Ads, Ad Volume, & Active Ad Networks

Consider this sneaky if you will, but there are several ways (and appropriate tools -- with some provided by major traffic sources such as Meta and Google) to find the ad volume and active ad networks that each of your competitors use. 

• Get retargeted: Get to each of your competitors’ sites and get “retargeted” -- with ads following you for a while after your visit. Immediately get to see their ads and the fact that they are retargeting (if they are).

• Devour ad libraries: Maintained by major traffic sources such as Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and others. Meta itself has an ad library and a set of tools such as Library API, Ad library, ad data set, and more. Similarly, Google Transparency Center can provide you with tons of information and data about the ads your competitors are running.

• Browse Google & Social networks, as you do: Just browsing any of the social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Pinterest will introduce you to several ads (some of these from your direct competitors). Instead of casually browsing, take notes: What are they advertising? What are they offering? Who are they trying to reach? 

• Use competitive research tools: Tools like Panoramata, Semrush, Similarweb, Adbeat, Spyfu, BigSpy, and Minea from AdSpy can all help you spy on competitors’ ads fast. These tools are purpose-built to help you uncover golden nuggets of information on your competitors (which would be otherwise hard to find). 

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Email Volume & Email Deliverability and List Size 

Log into Panoramata and you can practically use a magnifying glass to dissect, open, see, and learn from all of the email marketing campaigns that your competitors run. 

This includes email design, email copy (content), subject lines used for email marketing, the frequency of emails sent, spam score for each of the subject lines used, and even their complete email marketing calendar. 

Designs, offers, creatives, email copy — it’s all there for you to get inspired by. Choose from your known competitors or those that you didn’t even know existed.

Panoramata will show entire lists of brands in your industry, other niches or industries, and more. 

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Creatives, Angles, Brand Voice & Style

For the most part — across all creative types such as ads and emails — it’s the creatives (defined as a mix of visuals such as images or videos along with ad text or email text) that you’ll see first. 

Benchmark your own creatives against that of your competitors — how do they use their brand colors, brand voice, and style within their creatives?

What do the designs look like? What kind of copy (or content) do they use? 

Next, look at angles: if they have one offer, how many different ways are they making that offer? Do they tend to use several different ways to make offers or to create ads? 

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SEO Profile & Organic Social Growth 

One of the more “long-term” things to look out for and benchmark your brand against that of your competitors is the ever-changing SEO profile and social media growth of your competition — driven by your competitors’ consistent output of content, social media efforts, other content marketing strategies, and search engine optimization efforts. 

Metrics for benchmarking — considering SEO profile and growth — is not “instant”, however. This aspect of competitive analysis requires a “time-based” and long-term approach. 

Create lists on Panoramata to track your competitors’ SEO profiles and see how they grow over time. For truly deep analysis for SEO, consider full-fledged SEM analysis tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs. 

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Pricing & Offers

Looking out for competitor pricing (for similar products) in your niche is an excellent benchmark to look out for and to keep tabs on. 

Using these pricing benchmarks, you’ll catch yourself if you are pricing too low and also know how to position your products — given how your competitors do it. 

In each of the asset types you look at — including ads, websites, landing pages, and emails —   Spot pricing and the offers being made.

What are products usually priced at? What kind of discounts are your competitors giving away? How are these offers being made? 

Watch out for aspects such as tone, style, voice, calls-to-action used, and more.

Common Competitor Benchmarking Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

1. Picking the Wrong Competitors to Compare Against

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is benchmarking against businesses that are way out of their league. I've seen countless startups try to measure themselves against industry giants, which is like comparing a corner store to Walmart.

Sure, you might learn something, but you'll probably just end up feeling defeated and setting goals that are completely out of reach.

Instead, look for competitors who are actually in your weight class. Find businesses serving the same customers, with similar resources, and operating at a comparable scale.

If you want to be ambitious, pick companies that are maybe one step ahead of you—their strategies will actually be relevant to where you are now.

The key is finding competitors whose success you can realistically replicate with your current capabilities.

2. Using Stale or Wrong Information

There's nothing worse than making strategic decisions based on outdated information. I've watched businesses completely miss the mark because they were analyzing a competitor's pricing from six months ago, not realizing those prices had already changed twice.

The digital world moves fast. What worked last quarter might be completely irrelevant today. Customer preferences shift, market conditions change, and your competitors are constantly tweaking their approach.

Make sure you're working with fresh data. Set up regular check-ins to verify your information is still accurate. Tools that give you real-time insights into what competitors are actually doing right now will save you from making decisions based on yesterday's news.

3. Getting Lost in the Numbers

Don't get me wrong—metrics matter. But if you're only looking at revenue figures, website traffic, and follower counts, you're missing half the story.

Those numbers won't tell you why customers actually choose one brand over another, or how people really feel about a company.

I've seen businesses copy a competitor's tactics just because their numbers looked good, without understanding the context behind those results. Sometimes a company's high engagement comes from controversy, not genuine customer love.

Take time to dig deeper. Read customer reviews, pay attention to how competitors talk to their audience, and notice what people are actually saying about them on social media.

The stories behind the numbers are often more valuable than the numbers themselves.

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Getting Started with E-commerce Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking isn't just something nice to have—it's essential if you want to stay relevant in today's market. When you really understand what your competitors are doing well (and where they're falling short), you can make smarter decisions about your own business.

The goal isn't to copy everything your competitors do, but to learn from their successes and mistakes so you can carve out your own path to success.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between competitor analysis and competitor benchmarking?

Think of competitor analysis as taking a deep dive into what one specific competitor is doing—their strategy, their strengths, where they're struggling. You're trying to understand their business inside and out.

Benchmarking is more about comparison shopping. You're looking at multiple competitors to see how you stack up and where you need to improve. Analysis is about understanding; benchmarking is about measuring and improving.

How do you actually benchmark against competitors?

Start by figuring out who your real competitors are—not just the obvious ones, but anyone competing for your customers' attention and money. Then start gathering information: How do their websites perform? What are they charging? How do they market themselves? What are customers saying about them?

Once you have that intel, compare it to your own performance and look for gaps you need to close or opportunities you can exploit.

Who should be on your competitor list?

Obviously include your direct competitors—companies selling similar products to the same customers. But don't stop there. Think about indirect competitors too: businesses that solve the same problems in different ways, or companies that compete for the same budget or time from your target customers.

Cast a wide net initially, then narrow it down to the competitors that are most relevant to your specific situation and goals.

How do you analyze e-commerce competitors effectively?

Start with the basics: Who are they targeting? What are they selling and at what prices? How do their websites work? What's their marketing strategy?

But go beyond the surface level. Look at customer reviews to understand what people love and hate. Check out their social media to see how they engage with customers. Pay attention to their email marketing, their content strategy, even how they handle customer service.

The goal is to build a complete picture of how they operate so you can identify what's working for them and what gaps you might be able to exploit.