It’s not top secret.
Your competitors’ marketing strategies aren’t locked in a safe and thrown out to sea before sinking to the ocean’s depths–that is to say, they’re not irretrievable nor confidential.
You can access them now if you know how to look.
With a few clicks, you can spy on your competitors and learn what they’re doing differently or effectively in their digital marketing.
Why do you need this information?
Data supplied by brands themselves from their platforms and ads are crucial for competitive analysis, so you can see how you stack up against other brands.
If you’re a newcomer to your industry, you can use this data to rise to the top. If you’re a more established brand, use this information to stay on top and ahead of the competition.
Quite simply, if you neglect competitive analysis, you lose. The ecommerce market is cutthroat and there are thousands of brands vying for consumers’ attention.
To survive and thrive, competitor analysis is a must.
In this article, we’ll go into detail about why competitive analysis is beneficial to any business and how to conduct competitive analysis for your ecommerce brand. We’ll also suggest tools and websites you can use right away and address common questions.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
- What is competitive analysis?
- Why is competitive analysis important for e-commerce?
- Benchmark your business against the competition
- Find solutions to problems
- Know your USP and stand out
- Spot weaknesses and opportunities
- Optimize your website
- Find out what works and which channels to focus on
- How to do a competitive analysis step-by-step
- Define your e-commerce business and your goals
- Identify your competitors
- Audit your selected competitors
- View their A/B tests
- Read their email newsletters
- Explore their websites
- Assess their ads (Google Ads. Facebook Ads)
- Check out their SMS and tech stack
- Tools and Websites for Competitor Analysis
- Frequently Asked Questions on Competitive Analysis in Ecommerce
- What is ecommerce competitive analysis?
- How do you analyze ecommerce competitors?
- Does competitor analysis take a long time?
What is competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is a process of identifying competitors, researching their products and marketing strategies, and analyzing the data gathered to improve your business.
The information you gather will help you understand your competitors and inform your next steps as a brand. Through competitive analysis, you could, for example, find ways to reduce churn, increase acquisitions, or improve sales.
The catch is that competitive analysis can look like different things, depending on your industry and business. The process can be confusing and overwhelming, especially when you don’t have adequate tools.
Why is competitive analysis important for e-commerce?
1. Benchmark your business against the competition
Competitive analysis helps you in benchmarking or comparing your progress to the industry standards and your competitors. It helps you identify areas for improvement, especially ones where you’re lagging behind and not using new trends or changes in your industry.
When you conduct benchmarking, you also have an objective perspective of where your company is at, growth-wise.
2. Find solutions to problems
Any business, new or old, will bump into problems that they will struggle to solve without gathering ideas from external sources such as competitors. Competitive analysis gives you a fountain of ideas to draw upon when you’re looking for solutions.
It’s also less risky to implement fixes when you know it’s worked for others in the same boat as you. You’ll filter the good ideas from the bad without spending time experimenting with ineffective methods.
3. Know your USP and stand out
By knowing your competitors, your unique value proposition and strengths will become clearer for you and you can highlight it in your marketing and effectively differentiate yourself.
As a result, you’ll become a more compelling option to your target audience.
4. Spot weaknesses and opportunities
Aside from that, you’ll also see what mistakes other companies are making and capitalize on those opportunities. Their missteps can be your achievements.
5. Optimize your website
One of the most useful information you can get out of competitive analysis is how their website is structured. They could, for example, provide a better customer experience for website visitors and you may fall short in this aspect.
Looking into what they’re doing with their website can inform the changes you’ll make to streamline your website’s functionality.
6. Find out what works and which channels to focus on
Your competitors may have done their due diligence and honed in on what channels give the best ROI. By determining which tools they use and which channels they spend most of their efforts on, you could follow suit and create campaigns on those same channels.
By observing their ads and emails, for example, you can find what content resonates with your audience the most and create similar content.
How to do a competitive analysis step-by-step
1. Define your e-commerce business goals
The first step is to look inward.
Look at your business and define your goals and problems. There must be a hurdle you’re trying to overcome while pursuing your objectives.
Once you’ve identified it, formulate a hypothesis. Why do you think you’re facing this problem?
Afterward, if you haven’t done so yet, research your target audience.
For example, your ideal customer might be middle-aged lower-income people who live in cities, millennials without kids, or companies with more than 200 employees.
Be specific. This step matters because your analysis should involve businesses with the same audience as yours.
2. Identify your competitors
After, it’s time to determine which competitors to include in your analysis.
You may have dozens of competitors but not all of them will be worth observing.
The ideal competitors are ecommerce businesses that have grown fast, sustained their growth, and have the same challenges you have.
Fast-growing companies that have been around a long time are worth taking a closer look at because their operations are more sophisticated. Companies like this include Glossier, Mejuri, AG1, Parade, Warby Parker, Ritual, and Everlane.
Note that you don’t have to include direct competitors in your analysis. As long as the business is worth studying and falls within the parameters we’ve set, it will be a fruitful analysis.
It’s also good to steer clear of early-stage companies. They’re likely still experimenting with their growth strategies so their methods won’t be a reliable source of inspiration.
How can you find these companies?
Crunchbase and Amazon are good resources. You can also Google keywords your target audience uses when looking for products like yours and check the websites that come up on the results.
3. Audit your selected competitors
This is the meat and potatoes of competitive analysis: the audit.
This step involves going through your competitors’ growth strategies. Do the following:
View their A/B tests
Successful brands frequently run A/B tests to increase clicks and conversions.
After running the test, you assess which variant you ran (one variant could be an existing landing page while the second one could have a different CTA, different promotion, or ad copy) is most effective.
How to access an A/B test
A page visitor sees only one variant of a test once they’ve been categorized under one variant but you can work around this and view the other test.
- First, go on incognito mode to clear your browser’s cookies.
- Head to the link of the landing page or ad and keep refreshing until you see another variation.
- Screenshot each variant and compare.
The parts of the page they’re changing will give away which problem they’re trying to solve.
How to find hidden landing pages
However, there’s a caveat. Before you can view A/B tests, you first need to find your competitor’s hidden landing pages. Here’s how. You have two choices.
- Go to their website’s sitemap by adding sitemap.xml to the end of the website’s URL. For example, https://glossier.com/sitemap.xml will lead you to Glossier’s sitemap. Check the sitemap and look for the landing pages the brand is linking to in their ads.
- Alternatively, you can use Ahrefs or Semrush. They’ll find some landing pages for you automatically but the downside is you’ll never know how they’re used.
Or even better, you can go on Panoramata, search for a brand, and view their landing pages in detail automatically with no additional steps, with the ads they’re running on these specific landing pages (and when they run them).
Read their email newsletters and flows
Email is a hidden aspect of growth marketing that’s easily accessed. You just need to subscribe to a brand’s newsletters and you’re in.
However, that will leave you with a lot of emails clogging your inbox, not to mention that it’s time-consuming to sign up for these newsletters one by one.
Panoramata can track any brand’s newsletter for you automatically, no email subscriptions needed. Plus you get access to the full brand history!
After you have access to their emails, you have to be thorough and go through each piece of content they send to you as part of their mailing list.
Their welcome or onboarding flow will give you points for improvement in your flows.
You can also check what other flows they send subscribers and how they encourage them to purchase from their site such as sales and discounts they promote in their emails.
To take this a step further, you can also sign up for a free trial or buy their product.
Here are things you can consider when auditing your competitors’ emails:
- What products have they launched recently?
- How are their products similar and different to yours?
- What is the pricing of their products?
- What copy or taglines do they use frequently?
- What is their unique selling proposition?
Explore their websites
One of the most important content to audit is also the most visible: your competitor’s website.
From there, you can glean what content they’re publishing on their blog, which articles are performing best, and the number of page visitors they have. Use Ahrefs to gather data on their website’s SEO.
When doing a website audit, you should also research what keywords your competitors are ranking for and grasp their content strategy. Take note of these and think of how you can differentiate your brand.
You can also double-check the web traffic volume a company has by going on SimilarWeb or Panoramata.
With Panoramata, you don’t need multiple tools to see details about a competitor’s website. It’s automatically tracked for you and you can view all this data on just one platform, instead of hopping from one tool to another.
You can also see any changes that have been made on a website, which is a great thing to have in handy.
You can also see how many times your competitor has been googled over time, which tells you if their brand is doing well. Check Google Trends for this information.
If interest in their brand is dwindling, then that’s a sign that you shouldn’t apply their practices to your business.
Assess their ads
Advertising is a huge chunk of a brand’s marketing efforts so looking for your competitors’ ads will give you pointers on how to improve your own ads.
There are three platforms for viewing ads. We’ll go into how you can use each one to find your competitors.
Google Ads
Use Ahrefs or a similar tool to see paid search keywords your competitors have.
If you observe that they invest in certain keywords more than others, their keywords are probably working. Follow their lead and try those keywords as well.
Facebook Ads
Go to Facebook Ads Library to view ads from any company listed on Facebook. However to see which ads are used the most (you can’t do this on Facebook Ads Library), you first have to be retargeted.
You can be retargeted by visiting your competitor’s website and then going to Facebook. Turn off your ad blocker for this step.
Once you’re back on Facebook Ads Library, see which of your competitor’s ads have the highest engagement. These are the ones that are most effective for their target audience and the ones they publish the most.
Analyze why the ads perform well and check the comments to find what questions viewers ask about their product.
Panoramata
A simpler option is to use Panoramata to view ads automatically. Not only will you get their ads, but you can see their accompanying landing pages as well.
To do this, go to Panoramata and search for a brand using the search tool. Go to the brand’s page and then click the ads tab to view their ads. You can also check out their past ads and filter all ads by date range, networks, assets, and more.
On top of that, you can add ads (as well as emails, landing pages, SMS campaigns, and website snapshots) to lists for future reference or collaboration with your team.
Check out their SMS and tech stack
Finally, check your competitors’ tech stack using BuiltWith to see what tools they’re using. These tools might be something you can add to your tech stack too.
And if you can, check out your competitors’ SMS marketing. SMS is a medium that has a higher open rate than emails so seeing how businesses engage with their customers through mobile messaging will help you figure out how to boost your engagement.
See if you can opt-in to receive your competitors’ text messages. They’ll often include this in newsletters or customer service information.
To make this easier, use Panoramata to check both your competitor’s SMS and tech stack.
4. Implement the results of your competitive analysis in your business strategy
Put it all together by analyzing the information you’ve gathered about your competition. Hopefully, the entire data collection process gave you ideas you can use to solve the problem you’re encountering, as defined in the first step.
Choose which ideas can be applied to your brand and A/B test them against your existing practices to see what works better.
Measure the results of your experiment and then decide if the idea is worth implementing.
Of course, if it’s too expensive to run, too much of a drain on your resources, or not considerably better than your existing practice, you can skip it and find another idea instead.
You can use this free template to guide you through your own competitive analysis. It lists the most important information you need to know about each brand you’re analyzing.
And if you want to automate the entire process and save time, Panoramata gathers all you need to know about your competitors, including their ads, landing pages, emails, tech stack, and SMS.
Best of all, you can get started for free.
Tools and Websites for Competitor Analysis
Some of the tools and software you can use to conduct competitor analysis are:
- Panoramata
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Moz
- Facebook Ads Library
- Google Trends
- Google Analytics
- SimilarWeb
- Sensor Tower
- Built With
Frequently Asked Questions on Competitive Analysis in Ecommerce
- What is ecommerce competitive analysis?
Ecommerce competitive analysis is gathering data on your competitors to improve your marketing strategy, gain a competitive advantage, or find a solution to a business problem.
- How do you analyze ecommerce competitors?
To start your ecommerce competitor analysis, you need to first define your goals and identify your competitors.
Next, conduct an audit of their digital content such as ads, blogs, social media, and newsletters.
Finally, interpret the data you’ve collected and apply it to your business.
- Does competitor analysis take a long time?
The duration of a competitor analysis process depends on your business, market size, and goals.
The basics can be done in a few hours but allot even longer for more exhaustive analysis like say, a couple of weeks, especially if you’re collecting this information manually.
