In the highly competitive e-commerce industry, following the best competitors of your brand’s industry and spying on their best practices is very important to guarantee the growth and success of your brand. Also, creating benchmarks of the best competitors you are following is a good practice for good analysis.
Fortunately, there is a benchmark platform called Panoramata containing thousands of brands in all the key industries and offers easy manipulation and access to all emails and ads. It also gives the possibility of creating unlimited benchmarks, organizing and sharing your analysis findings with your team in one place.
So, to optimize your business decision-making process, fully use Panoramata's features to spy on your rivals’ best emails and ads marketing strategies.
How to Identify Top Competitor Brands for Analysis and Benchmarking
You can find specific competitor data easily with Panoramata's search function. Simply click "Search Brands" and use the search bar to find your desired competitor by name.
Here we searched for the brand “Prose”:
Now, you have access to various tabs on the competitor’s page on Panoramata, named Company, Emails, Journey, Landing Pages, Software, Ads, and Organic & SEO:
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- Company: Get valuable statistics and information about emails, ads, product page updates’ notifications, and existing related benchmarks of the competitor.
- Emails: Access all the emails sent by your competitor and examine the subject lines and the contents of the emails to get the best practices. Then, you can save the best ones in a dedicated file. So, with Panoramata, no need to subscribe to each competitor’s newsletter and fill your mailbox with emails of all kinds from competitors.
- Journey: Learn the best practices from your competitors regarding some common email sequences (if applicable) sent to their visitors such as the Welcome Journey and the Lost Checkout Journey.
- Landing Pages: View landing page screenshots of the website home page and some best-selling product pages of your competitor. So, you can learn how to make the best landing pages by analyzing your competitor ones and keeping an eye on eventual changes they may make overtime on their landing pages
- Softwares: It contains the list of detected software installed and used by your competitor in the store. So, here you will stay up to date regarding the right software to use on your store for good optimization as well as the new ones to not miss to stay in the competition.
- Ads: Access ****in one place all the Ads created by your competitor, examine the content of each Ad and learn the best practices in terms of ad copy and media used. The same as for emails, you can save the best Ads as well in files that are shareable with your work team inside or outside Panoramata.
- Organic & SEO: Gain valuable insights into competitor’s website traffic and different SEO factors such as keywords, domain rating, and backlinks. So, from the comparison of your traffic and your SEO statistics to your competitor ones, you will be able to know the right improvement to apply in your website or store to stay competitive in your ranking.
How To Find Your Competitors Using Keywords and Filters
To effectively find your desired brands for benchmarking and analysis, use Panoramata's filters and search options. You can refine your search results by a specific keyword and combine it with filters for a more targeted approach.
Here you have three options for your keyword search:
- Search by Keywords:
For instance, if you are looking for brands related to a specific keyword, you can search by that keyword in the same way as explained before if you search for a brand by its name.
- Search by Panoramata’s Filters:
Here you can filter your competitors by Industry, Country, Language and Software. According to your search needs, you can also, combine some or all of the four filters.
- Search by Keyword and Panoramata’s Filters:
Combining the keyword and at least one of the four filters, allows you to get a close or even the exact targeted list of competitors. The more filters you use with the keyword the more your competitors list you get is refined.
Suppose that you are a Haircare brand and you are looking for your worldwide competitors. So, you can put for example the word “Hair” in the search bar and you can select Personal care in the industry filter, WW (Woldwide) in Country filter and EN (English) in the Language filter. So, you will get as a result, a list of worldwide Haircare brands selling Hair related products or services using English as their communication language in emails and ads. If you’re not searching for any particular language, you can uncheck EN.
You can get more refined results in case you are only interested in competitors that use specific software by checking all of them in the software filter.
Creating Benchmarks on Panoramata: A Step-by-Step Guide
Here we will suppose that we are a haircare brand and we want to benchmark the 10 following competitors in this industry: Color Wow, Crown Affair, Briogeo, Prose, Function of Beauty, Sienna Naturals, Nutrafol, Champo, Keeps and Luvme Hair.
To do so, you follow these steps:
- In the top left of the platform’s dashboard, click on “Benchmarks” and then on “All Your Benchmarks”.
- Click on “Create new Benchmark” to create a new Benchmark.
- Title: We call our Benchmark “Haircare“ and this is optional.
- Select main brand: This field is only used if you want to select a brand to compare with all the brands of the Benchmark. So, as it’s optional, we leave it blank in our case as we do not need it.
- Select Brands to Benchmark: You select your 10 competitors and you can even select up to 21 competitors for each Benchmark created.
Now, you click on “Create Benchmark” and the benchmark is created in a snap of the fingers and is accessible from your benchmarks dashboard.
Exploring the Sections of Panoramata's Benchmark Dashboard
In this section, we will stick with the same Benchmark example of the 10 Haircare brands.
So, after creating the Benchmark, automatically all the data regarding Emails and Ads are generated and accessible for your analysis.
Let’s find out how we can take advantage of each section:
Here we can see the average of emails, ads published and average Spam score of all the 10 brands of the Benchmark in various date ranges.
The suggested date ranges are last 14, last 30 and last 90 days and by default, the data displayed is of the last 30 days.
Here you have an extra option allowing you to customize the date range according to your analysis needs in terms of the period of the year you are targeting.
Let’s say we are interested in the month of December 2022 which is a competitive marketing moment and you want to get insights about the 10 brands’ emails and ads tactics during this important period. So we select 1 to 31 December and we hit submit.
In the rest of the sections, we keep the same date range for our Haircare Benchmark.
Summary Data of Your Competitors: Insights for Competitive Analysis
This section is helpful to have an idea about the averages (The three values in blue color) of emails sent, the Ads published and the emails spam scores for December 2022 for the 10 brands.
The values with an arrow on the right side of each section, indicate a percentage of comparison with the previous period. The green color means an increase and the red color means a decrease.
Compared to November, we've observed an 11.36% increase in emails sent, a 225% increase in published ads, and an 8.67% decrease in spam score. It's common to see a rise in emails and ads during the Christmas season as brands aim to boost their sales.
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Email Insights of Benchmark Brands: What You Need to Know
Email Performance Analysis: Understanding Email Scoring and Optimization
Here you can see the total of emails sent and the average of the emails’ score for each brand of the Benchmark in one table.
The performance rates may be Good, Fair and Poor:
- Good means that the value is better than the average of all Benchmark’s brand values.
- Fair means that the value is close to the average of the Benchmark’s brand values.
- Poor means that the value is worse than the average of Benchmark’s brand values.
You can sort values of “Emails sent” and “Email Scoring” in Descending or Ascending Order by hitting the column title “Emails sent” or “Email Scoring” or the icon next to them.
NB: You can use the same performance columns and sorting features in all the tables within the Benchmark.
Here we sorted in descending order the number of emails sent.
In our case, Color Wow is the best with a total of 58 emails. So, this brand deserves to be prioritized in our analysis of emails and you can access all its December email content in one place just by clicking on the Search icon in the last column of the table with the facility of switching from one email to another.
Discover Best Practices for Email Optimization and Delivery
To increase the chances of your emails being read by your subscribers and not ending up in the promotions tab, aim to keep your spam score lower than your competitors' average.
Prioritize analyzing the email content of brands with the best Spam score, among the leaders in the number of emails sent. This can help you learn the best techniques for optimizing your email subject lines and content.
In our case, Function of Beauty is among the best brands with a good number of emails compared to the average with 22 emails and is the top in terms of the Spam Score with the lowest rate of -4.54. So, its emails’ content and structure deserve to take a look at for some best practices.
Weekly Average of Emails Sent by the Benchmark’s brands
This graph can provide you with valuable insights to stay competitive during December. It shows the average number of emails sent weekly by the top ten brands of the Benchmark. You can use this information to set a minimum target for your brand to send per week and stay competitive during the holiday season.
Breaking Down the Ads Benchmark on Panoramata
Brands' Ad Performance: Number of Ads and Ad Copies
This section displays the number of new ads created and ad copies used by each brand in the benchmark. You can sort this data in ascending or descending order, as explained in the emails table. By clicking on the search icon in the last column, you can view all the ad content of December of the corresponding brand.
You can rearrange the order of the 10 brands in the table to view the top performers in terms of the number of ads created in December by sorting them in descending order.
Analyzing Ad Media Strategy of Benchmark Brands
This table can provide further insights into the ad media strategy of the top brands selected based on the number of ads created in December. By analyzing the proportion of images and videos used in their ads, you can gain valuable information to enhance your own ad media strategy.
Average Weekly Ads Created by Brands in the Benchmark
This graph displays the average number of ads created per week by the ten brands in the benchmark, which can help you set a minimum threshold for your brand's ad creation during December. It works similarly to the email graph we explained earlier.
To conclude, apart from the sections mentioned earlier, Panoramata provides several beneficial features to help you analyze your competitors. You can track your Benchmark by pinning it for a shortcut access on the platform dashboard and you can also share it with your team. Additionally, you can create lists for Benchmark emails or ads. To learn more about these features, you can read a detailed post on Benchmarks on Panoramata.
