When you work in a team, you have to present your findings at some point, especially when conducting a competitive analysis.
A report is a straightforward way to compile and present data to your colleagues and superiors so you can formulate your next steps or understand your competitor landscape better.
A competitor analysis report provides valuable insights into the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of businesses in your industry.
More importantly, it forces you down a path of organized and structured competitor analysis – an incredibly smart way to know your blindspots, understand where you are currently, and more.
Further, it helps you make informed decisions, refine your marketing or branding strategies, and capture market opportunities.
In this article, we’ll take you through the steps to making a competitive analysis report, the sources of information to find, and the metrics to track when conducting your analysis.
What is a competitive analysis report?
A competitive analysis report is a document that evaluates your competitors' business strategies, market positioning, strengths, and weaknesses. You can use a competitor analysis report to uncover opportunities you might be missing out on.
Understand how your competitors operate, identify industry trends, and find new audiences with a well-prepared competitor analysis report.
By analyzing competitors, thanks to comprehensive competitor analysis reports, you can:
- Get inspired
- Learn fast
- Benchmark your own performance against your competitors
- Identify opportunities in the market
- Develop strategies to differentiate your business
- Sometimes, you’ll also learn what not to do while tracking competitors
At Panoramata, we live and breathe competitive analytics reports and we think you’ll benefit from these too.
Creating a Competitor Analysis Report: Steps and Tips
Creating an effective competitor analysis report involves systematic steps. Most of the effort goes into legwork, but it is easily achieved thanks to the information and tools available for you today:
Define your objectives
For competitor analysis, your objectives could vary. Depending on your objectives, what you emphasize while creating a competitor analysis report will also change correspondingly but the approach is similar.
Some of your objectives could include:
- Identifying all of the marketing strategies your competitors use
- Drill down on specific digital marketing channels (such as ads, email marketing, or content strategy) and learn from your competitors
- Identify new market opportunities: Are your competitors targeting new audiences, new geographic locations, etc.?
- Understand pricing strategies: What do they sell? What’s the average ticket size of their products?
- Brand and Positioning: You are selling similar products but is their branding stronger than yours? Are your competitors positioning products differently?
Segment your competitors
Then, take some time out to segment your competitors into:
- Direct competitors: Businesses targeting the same audience with similar products.
- Indirect competitors: Businesses solving the same problem with different products.
Panoramata has a “lists” feature that you can easily use to add competitors and track several different aspects of their marketing, branding, marketing assets, campaigns, and more.
Stay focused
Here’s something crucial (and we see several businesses drifting into Alice’s Wonderland). Starting with the objective defined above, only focus on data gathering that is relevant to your purpose.
A minute here and an hour there – looking for unimportant things – is time lost.
Allow us to explain (and we’ll take digital marketing strategies as an example):
If you are doing a competitor analysis report to learn marketing strategies your competitors use, stick to marketing strategies.
You don’t need to focus on the latest investor funding rounds, the flutter of activity around hiring, the number of employees, and so on.
Creating competitor analysis reports is a one-time task (it still needs updating and monitoring though) that pays off beautifully in the long run.
Choose your tools
With that out of the way, use a mix of primary and secondary sources and tools:
- Primary (public) data: Websites, social media profiles, reviews.
- Use tools like Panoramata, Semrush, Similarweb, or SpyFu to get the precise information you seek (e.g. SEO strategy, content strategy, social media presence, ads, email campaigns, offers, discounts, and other campaigns).
For the most part (unless you are looking for a major pivot, new product launches, and so on), don’t worry about time-consuming activities such as customer surveys, interviews, and first-hand research.
Start tracking and analyzing
Evaluate competitors in key areas such as:
- Web Properties: Websites, landing pages, start pages on social, interstitials, and others.
- Digital Marketing Channels: Blogs, SEO profiles, email marketing campaigns, advertisements on paid traffic networks, social media, and more.
- Branding: logos, colors, brand voice, and more.
- Market Positioning: The unique selling proposition (USP) of each competitor.
- Products/Services: Features, pricing, and differentiation.
- Customer Feedback: Reviews and testimonials highlighting strengths and weaknesses. Find these on forums, social media networks, Reddit, Quora, and others (if available). Also, look up Google and other reviews.
Here are the metrics and benchmarks you can track and compile when creating a competitor analysis report:
- Website traffic and engagement.
- Social media followers and activity.
- Revenue estimates (if publicly available).
- Product pricing and positioning.
How to Write A Competitor Analysis Report
Most competitor analysis reports fail because they're either too broad to be useful or so narrow they miss the bigger picture. The best reports strike a balance—they give you enough detail to make smart decisions without drowning you in data you can't act on.
Getting Started: From Raw Data to Clear Insights
Start by stepping back and looking for patterns. What surprised you during your research? Which competitors consistently showed up as threats across different areas?
Where did you find gaps that nobody's filling? These questions will guide your entire report.
Create a simple comparison chart with your key competitors across the top and important factors down the side. This isn't for the final report—it's for you to spot trends and outliers.
Sometimes a competitor's weakness in one area becomes irrelevant because they're dominating somewhere else entirely.
The golden rule here: if you can't explain why something matters to your business strategy, it doesn't belong in the report. Your job isn't to catalog everything competitors are doing. It's to figure out what their moves mean for you.
Structuring Your Competitor Report
Every competitor analysis report needs the same basic sections, but the order matters more than most people realize.
Executive Summary
The executive summary goes first in the final version, but write it last. This section sells the value of your entire analysis in two pages or less.
Focus on the most critical threats, the biggest opportunities, and your top three recommendations. If executives read nothing else, they should understand what action to take from this section alone.
Methodology and Scope
Methodology comes next and often gets overlooked, but it's crucial for credibility. Explain which competitors you picked and why, what research methods you used, and any limitations in your data.
This prevents questions later about why you didn't include certain companies or data sources.
Market Landscape Overview
The market landscape overview sets the stage by explaining the broader context.
What's happening in your industry? How big is the market? Who are the major players and what's their market share? What are the key market trends and growth drivers?
This section helps readers understand why certain competitive moves matter more than others and provides essential context for the detailed analysis that follows.
Individual Competitor Profiles
These profiles form the meat of your report. Here's where many reports go wrong—they either become too descriptive or miss the strategic implications.
For each competitor, cover their business model, target customers, market positioning, product offerings, pricing strategy, distribution channels, marketing approach, key strengths, notable weaknesses, and recent strategic moves.
Always organize these profiles consistently using the same framework to enable easy comparison, and connect these facts to what they mean for your strategy.
Comparative Analysis
The comparative analysis pulls everything together by directly comparing competitors across the dimensions that matter most to your business. This is where tables, charts, and visual comparisons really shine.
Don't try to compare everything—focus on the factors that will influence your strategic decisions.
Competitive Gaps and Opportunities
This section translates your analysis into potential moves. Where are competitors vulnerable? What customer needs aren't being met?
Which market segments are underserved? This section bridges the gap between analysis and action.
Strategic Recommendations
This section wraps up the report with specific, prioritized actions based on your findings.
Each recommendation should clearly connect to insights from your analysis. Vague suggestions like "improve our product" don't help anyone.
Competitor Report Writing Tips
Pretend you’re a storyteller
Writing about competitors can quickly become dry and academic. The best reports build tension, reveal surprises, and lead to logical conclusions.
Instead of writing "Company X has raised $50 million in Series B funding," try "Company X's recent $50 million Series B suggests they're preparing for aggressive expansion, likely in the mid-market segment where we currently have strong positioning."
Use specific examples to illustrate broader points
Rather than saying "Competitor A has strong marketing," show what that means: "Competitor A's LinkedIn ads have generated 3x the engagement of industry averages, and their case study content consistently ranks in the top search results for key buyer keywords."
Connect the dots between different findings
Maybe one competitor's pricing strategy only makes sense when you consider their recent partnership announcement and their CEO's background.
These connections often reveal strategic insights that aren't obvious from individual data points.
How to present a competitor analysis report
You need to know your audience. How you present your analysis depends entirely on who's consuming it, and this affects both content and format.
Even the best research becomes useless if stakeholders don't read it, so making reports scannable and easy to understand is crucial.
For executive audiences, lead with business impact and strategic implications. They care less about how competitors' products work and more about what competitive threats mean for revenue, market share, and strategic positioning.
Use clear visuals, keep technical details in appendices, and always include clear next steps with resource requirements and timelines. Focus on key findings that directly impact business strategy.
For product and marketing teams, include more tactical details about features, positioning, and execution.
These audiences want to understand not just what competitors are doing, but how they're doing it. They can handle more detailed comparisons and technical specifications.
For sales teams, focus on competitive battlecards and objection handling.
What are competitors' key weaknesses?
Where do they struggle with implementation? What do their customers complain about?
Sales teams need ammunition for competitive situations, not broad strategic insights.
Which section should you write first?
Most people write competitor analysis reports linearly, starting with the executive summary and working through each section. This approach almost always leads to multiple rewrites and unfocused content.
Instead, start with the competitive landscape overview. This forces you to establish the market context first and keeps your individual competitor analysis focused on what matters strategically.
You can't write good competitor profiles until you understand the broader competitive dynamics and market trends.
Next, write the individual competitor profiles using exactly the same structure for each one.
Industry best practices suggest starting with your most significant competitor—whether that's the market leader or your most direct threat.
This helps you work through your analytical framework while focusing on the highest-stakes analysis.
With those sections complete, the comparative analysis writes itself. You'll clearly see the patterns, gaps, and differentiators that matter most.
Focus your comparisons on the three to five dimensions that will most influence your strategic decisions.
Your recommendations should flow naturally from the patterns you've identified. Each suggestion should clearly connect to specific findings in your analysis.
If you can't draw a direct line from insight to recommendation, either the insight isn't important enough to include or the recommendation needs more support.
Only then should you write the executive summary. With the full analysis complete, you'll know which findings pack the most strategic punch and can craft a compelling preview of your report's value.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Comprehensive Catalog
The "comprehensive catalog" trap catches many first-time report writers. They try to document everything about every competitor, creating reports that are exhaustive but not useful. Remember: your goal is insight, not documentation.
Feature Comparison Spreadsheet
Another common mistake is the "feature comparison spreadsheet" approach. While product comparisons have their place, they often miss the forest for the trees. Always ask "so what?" after documenting what competitors are doing.
Analysis Paralysis
Many reports also suffer from "analysis paralysis"—they present findings but never make the logical leap to strategic implications. Your readers shouldn't have to figure out what your analysis means for the business.
Snapshot
Finally, avoid the "snapshot" problem. Competitive analysis isn't a one-time activity. The best reports include a plan for ongoing monitoring and updates. Markets move too fast for annual competitive reviews to remain relevant.
Competitor analysis reporting: a long-term view
Creating competitor analysis reports is a one-time task (it still needs updating and monitoring though) that pays off beautifully in the long run.
Knowing your competitors, understanding their marketing efforts, and staying updated on their campaigns helps you stay ahead of the game and avoid slow starts, false starts, or not starting at all.
Want to stay ahead of your competition?
Start building lists of your competitors and get immediate access to competitor profiles, ad campaigns, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, marketing tools used, and much more with Panoramata.
FAQs
1. How to make a competitor analysis report?
Start by identifying your key competitors and gathering data on their products, marketing strategies, and performance. Organize the insights into sections like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to present actionable findings.
2. What are the 5 parts of a competitive analysis?
The five key parts include identifying competitors, analyzing their products or services, reviewing marketing strategies, assessing strengths and weaknesses, and pinpointing opportunities for your business. This structure ensures a clear and thorough understanding of the competitive landscape.
3. How do you build competitive analysis?
Use tools like Panoramata, Similarweb, or Google Trends to collect data on competitors' performance, ads, and content. Then, analyze the findings to highlight gaps, opportunities, and areas where your business can outperform competitors.
