If you want to compare your campaigns with your competitors, start here: compare them on metrics that you can measure.
That’s the most important part.
If you pick metrics you can’t gather over the long term, you won’t be able to compare yourself properly over several weeks, months, or years. And if you only get access to one piece of proprietary data once, that can help right away, but it’s not a real comparison point.
You need something you can gather yourself, access regularly, and use again later.
That’s what makes the comparison useful.
Once you have that, the next thing to understand is this: when you look at competitor campaigns, don’t focus too much on how many ads they published or which small tests they put live.
The most important thing is to understand their focus.
What are they doubling down on? What is their strength? What kind of creative, acquisition channel, or campaign angle are they really pushing?
That’s where the signal is.
If a competitor is doubling down on UGC creatives on Meta, quizzes on their website, or BOGO promotions on their email list, those are things that are likely working for them. And those are things you can try for yourself as well.
You also need to spot what they’re trying versus what they’re focusing on.
That matters a lot.
When you look at everything they are putting live, you should be able to separate the tests from the patterns. Some things are just attempts. Some things are clearly becoming part of the strategy. And if you can tell the difference, you get much better intel.
Another strong habit is being able to detect the first signals of underused channels or USPs.
Let’s say you’re a jewelry brand, and one competitor starts pushing a new angle in ads, like “easy to clean,” before the others. You should be able to detect that early. Because if that becomes one of their strengths, it could maybe become one of yours as well.
If you catch those signals early, try them for yourself, and see what results they bring, you never really run out of inspiration. Every time you check what competitors are doing, you find new ideas to test.
And one last point here, which loops back to the first one: track them over time and on different channels.
Do not only look at Instagram. Do not only look at email. Do not only look at ads or landing pages.
Look at everything at the same time.
And look at it over the span of several weeks and months, regularly. That’s where you gather the most useful data.
Once the best practices are clear, the next step is applying them to real content.
The easiest way to do that is to compare competitors across email marketing, ads and social, landing pages, and overall marketing velocity. And if you want to do this well and do it automatically, a platform like Panoramata makes the work much easier.
You select your competitors, and right away you get a dashboard showing what happened recently.
You can see which competitors were most active in email and ads, what kind of emails they sent, what kind of ads they launched, and then click into a live feed of the emails, ads, SMS, landing pages, and social posts they’ve been putting live.
That already makes tracking easier.
But the benchmark view is where comparison becomes really clear.
Let’s say you are looking at a set of jewelry brands and want to know how many emails the others are sending against you. You can see that right away. You can also see which company has the best deliverability, which company is sending the most optimized emails, and which one is doing the most promotions at that moment.
So you can quickly understand if you’re doing more or less than the others.
For example, one brand might be sending 26 emails over the last 30 days. You can change the time range, of course. You can also see that a high share of those emails are promotional, which makes sense if Black Friday is starting. And then you can click and review the actual emails immediately.
The same logic applies to ads.
You can see which company is publishing the most ads, where they are publishing them, what kind of ads they are using, and what kind of copy they are pushing. You can also track the USPs they are advertising on, which is one of the most useful parts of the comparison.
That helps you understand their focus much faster.
You can see the main creative, the networks they are distributing content on, and the kind of ads they are putting live. And because the data is accessible right away, you can compare yourself very easily inside your defined set of competitors.
The same goes for social as well.
If you want to know who has the most followers, who is growing the most on Instagram, or what kind of posts competitors have been publishing recently, you can access that in a click.
That covers the quantitative side of the comparison.
But you can go deeper.
You can compare what kind of emails competitors have been sending over the last 30 days, what kind of promotions they have been doing, and which USPs they are pushing the most. One of the most useful views here is the graph showing which value props each company is advertising on.
That helps you position competitors in the market right away.
You can see who is leaning into unique design, everyday jewelry, high quality, iconic design, free gifts, or other recurring angles. And once you see that side by side, the market becomes much easier to read.
This is also where tracking over time becomes very powerful.
Instead of doing everything manually, the platform can rank your company against your competitors automatically. You can see how you perform against the competitors you selected, and you can also get campaign ideas based on what happened recently.
That helps you understand what has been happening, what you may need to prepare, and how to match or outperform competitors more effectively.
And if you want a deeper dive into one competitor, you can do that too.
Each company has different tabs with different kinds of data. You can review emails, ads, and the rest of the strategy in more detail. There is also an AI layer inside the platform, so if you want to understand messaging trends, recent value props, or ad strategies over a given period, you can ask directly and get the answer from the data already collected.
One of the most overlooked comparison points is timing.
But timing matters a lot.
If you want to know when and how a competitor started speaking about Black Friday last year so you can compare that campaign against yours and plan better, the calendar view gives you that right away.
You can see when they started, how they built the promotion, and how long they kept it running.
For example, if you are looking on November 19, you may see that last year a competitor started Black Friday messaging around November 21 or November 22. This year, they may have started on November 19. You can also see how long the promotion lasted, sometimes into mid-December.
That kind of view helps you compare more than volume.
It helps you compare strategy.
And that’s really the point of this whole process.
Compare on metrics you can measure. Look for focus, not noise. Separate tests from what competitors are really doubling down on. Spot early signals. Track everything over time and across channels. And when you can, automate it so the comparison keeps working for you week after week.
