Is keeping track of your competitors feeling like a full-time job?
Do you often find yourself wishing you had to spend less effort trying to get a feel for what your competitors have been up to?
Thankfully, the tool that will solve your woes exists! You can easily monitor a competitor's activity — their emails, ads, promotions and launches — and summarize it in one click, so you get a competitor update in seconds instead of an afternoon.
You can get an overview of your competitor’s recent activity in just one click with Panoramata’s competitor update generator.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use this tool so you and your team can speed up your competitive analysis and view your competitor’s actions in one place.
Let’s get started!
What is competitive analysis?
First, we have to talk about what competitive analysis is and why you need it for your business.
Competitive analysis is the process of researching your competitors and comparing them to your company to assess your performance.
This process also lets you know your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and how to take advantage of them so you can improve and outperform them.
You can also use competitor monitoring tools to automate the actions involved when doing competitive analysis.
What are competitor monitoring tools?
Competitor monitoring tools assist businesses with monitoring their competitors’ activity, including but not limited to their ads, social media, and email newsletters.
You don’t have to skim through dozens of post just to get the gist of what they’ve been up to recently. With Panoramata’s generator, you can get an accurate summary in mere seconds.
Competitor analysis tools do the heavy lifting for you when you want to conduct a thorough and fact-based analysis. The data they gather will be more accurate than if you were to gather this information on your own.
Examples of competitive analysis tools include Semrush, Ahrefs, Panoramata and SimilarWeb.
Why you should monitor your competitor’s activity and updates
If you aren’t keeping track of your competitors yet, it’s not too late to start. Here’s why this should be part of your to do list as a brand.
Find opportunities your competitors have missed
One of the most useful things you can do with competitive analysis is to stay ahead of your competitors and take opportunities that they might not have noticed.
For example, you might find out that there’s a demand for a product that you and your competitor isn’t offering yet.
You can then take steps to develop a product that will fulfill that need and capitalize on it before your competitor does.
A gap in their catalog or a repeated stockout is demand nobody's serving yet, so scan the summary's marketing focus for what they push — and notice what they never mention.
Fine-tune your brand’s marketing
Ecommerce brands need to stay abreast of the latest trends in the marketplace to stay relevant.
When you conduct competitive analysis, you can quickly identify what products are in demand, what pricing strategies work, what your market responds to, and what marketing tactics to explore.
Their promotions and subject lines are a live read on what your shared market responds to. Copy the angle that keeps reappearing in their emails, not the discount.
Benchmark your performance
Do you know how your brand is faring compared to your competitors?
With competitive analysis, you won’t be left wondering if you’re being left in the dust. Benchmarks will tell you specifically what areas you need to focus on.
Volume and cadence tell you fast whether you're being out-shipped or over-sending. Put their email/ad counts next to yours each month — the gap is your to-do list.
How you can summarize your competitor’s activity in a single click
First, go to Brands Search and type in your competitor’s name on the search bar.
Click the competitor’s name from the search results. You will then be taken to their brand page.
In the summary tab, you can see “Ask AI” next to a lightbulb icon.
Click on the button. Wait for a few seconds while it generates a summary - or customize the exact question you'd like to ask!
It will then post the summary of the brand’s activity in the last 14 days. The summary will include:
- The focus of their recent marketing actions
- Number of emails sent
- Number of ads
- The content of their promotions
- The subject lines of their emails
It’s that quick!
What to include in a competitor update
Useful competitor update answers "what have they been doing?" in five parts:
- Recent marketing focus — the theme of the last two weeks.
- Number of emails sent — how hard they're leaning on email.
- Number of ads — how much paid budget is behind the push.
- Promotion content — what their offers say and how they frame them.
- Email subject lines and ad hooks — the exact hooks they're testing.
Three prompts you can paste into Ask AI
- Fast update > Summarize this brand’s activity for the selected period. Group the facts by email, ads, landing pages, and offers. Keep observed facts separate from interpretations.
- Pattern check > Find themes that appear in at least three captured assets. For each theme, show the dates, channels, and examples. Keep one-off ideas in a separate list.
- Decision brief > Turn the observed activity into four columns: fact, possible explanation, what would confirm it, and the smallest test we could run. Do not infer spend, revenue, targeting, or campaign success.
We have more prompts available for you in our Prompt Library for our MCP Documentation.
Keep track of your competitor’s activity and sharpen your marketing strategy
As you can see above, monitoring your competitors can be as easy as pie.
You don’t have to skim through dozens of posts just to get the gist of what they’ve been up to recently.
With Panoramata’s generator, you can get an accurate summary in mere seconds. It’s a game-changer for competitive analysis!
That being said, don’t forget to regularly check on your competitors as competitor monitoring is an ongoing process, not a one-off thing. You’ll be outpacing your peers in no time.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you track competitor activity?
There are many ways to monitor your competitor such as buying their product, conducting market research, checking their website and social media platforms, and reading customer reviews.
You can also use competitor tracking tools like Panoramata to simplify this process.
How do you create a competitor analysis report?
To make a competitor analysis report, you first have to conduct research into your competitor and your market to identify trends and customer personas.
Then, based on the information you’ve gathered, you can analyze the data and use a matrix to present your conclusions.
How do you measure competitor activity?
To measure competitor activity, you can use metrics like organic traffic, prices, number of ads, social media followers, search rankings, domain authority, and engagement rate.
How do you monitor competitor activity?
Watch their live marketing: emails, ads, promotions, launches and website changes. You can do it by hand — subscribing, checking, screenshotting — or use a competitor monitoring tool that logs it all and can summarize the last two weeks in one click.
What is a competitor activity summary?
A short, structured read on what a competitor has done recently — the focus of their marketing, how many emails and ads they ran, what their promotions said, and their email subject lines. It replaces skimming dozens of posts with a few seconds of reading.
How often should you check competitor activity?
For close rivals, weekly keeps you current without the noise. For a broader set, an automated summary you can pull on demand is better — you check when you're planning, not on a rigid schedule.
What tools summarize competitor activity?
Competitor monitoring tools like Panoramata pull a brand's emails, ads and promotions into one place and generate a one-click summary. Broader suites like Semrush, Ahrefs and SimilarWeb cover traffic and SEO signals rather than a campaign-level activity feed.
What should a competitor update include?
Five things: the focus of their recent marketing, the number of emails sent, the number of ads running, the content of their promotions, and their email subject lines. That's enough to know what they're pushing and why.
