Understanding your rivals' strategies is not just an option—it's a necessity. But you can't expect to do everything manually to get the right insights in time. Your goal is to gather enough data to make better marketing decisions. Don't waste time, don't get to flawed conclusions. We'll review the 10 most common mistakes marketers make when tracking competitors - and most importantly, how to build a process that gives you a true competitive advantage.
Here are the 10 mistakes we'll cover in this video - and how to fix each one of them to implement the right process.
It's easy to fall down the rabbit hole of trying to understand every single move a competitor makes. But this often leads to information overload and analysis paralysis.
The Fix: Focus on the big picture. Don't try to reverse-engineer their entire P&L. Instead, track their marketing activities over time to identify significant changes and trends that can inform your own strategy, not to replicate theirs.
Spying on competitors without a clear objective is a waste of time. Your analysis will lack focus and you won't know what to do with the data you collect.
The Fix: Before you start, define a specific goal. Are you looking to improve your customer acquisition channels? Understand their retention strategies? Find a new value proposition? A clear goal ensures your research is targeted and actionable.
Manually subscribing to competitor newsletters, taking endless screenshots, and documenting everything in spreadsheets is inefficient and unsustainable.
The Fix: Automate the process. Use a competitive intelligence platform like panoramata.co to automatically gather data on competitor emails, ads, and website changes. This frees up your time to focus on analysis and strategy, not manual data entry.
sporadic check-in every few months won't give you the insights you need. Marketing strategies evolve, and a single snapshot in time can be misleading.
The Fix: Be consistent. Whether it's weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, make competitor analysis a regular part of your routine. Consistent tracking is the only way to understand trends, identify patterns, and see what's truly working for them over the long term.
Waiting until the week of a major sales event like Black Friday to see what your competitors are doing means you've already fallen behind.
The Fix: Plan ahead. Start collecting data and inspiration for seasonal campaigns months in advance. By storing this information, you can analyze it and build a proactive strategy when the time is right.
Saving a great ad or a clever email is useless if you can't find it when you need it.
The Fix: Build organized swipe files. Use tags, labels, and folders to categorize the data you collect. A well-organized system allows you to quickly retrieve relevant examples and inspiration for any new campaign you're building.
Knowing that a competitor sent 15 emails during their Black Friday campaign is interesting, but it's not actionable on its own.
The Fix: Always compare competitor data against your own performance. The real insight comes from context. How many emails did you send? How did your open rates compare? This comparative analysis is what reveals true opportunities for improvement.
Your competitors are likely running campaigns across multiple channels. Focusing only on their Meta ads or their email newsletters will give you an incomplete and distorted view of their strategy.
The Fix: Take a 360-degree view. Analyze their activities across all relevant channels to understand their entire marketing funnel and how different platforms work together.
The biggest mistake of all is gathering valuable insights and then doing nothing with them.
The Fix: Turn insights into action. When you find a strategy or an idea you like, set a clear deadline to implement it. Competitive analysis is an ongoing loop of learning and implementing.
If competitor tracking is an afterthought, it will never deliver its full value.
The Fix: Integrate competitive intelligence into your core marketing processes. When it becomes a systematic part of your workflow, you will unlock a continuous stream of creativity, make consistently better marketing decisions, and ultimately, build more winning campaigns.
