Competitors: You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.
Even if you disdain the idea of competition, you can't escape the fact that competitor tracking is essential for any ecommerce brand’s success.
After all, good brands work hard to get their creative juices flowing but smart ecommerce brands cut the “learning curve” by directly learning from their competitors.
Plug into the best competitor analysis tools and you’ll have a wealth of information that’ll help you win. You'll set out with the intention to dominate with information, data, knowledge, and a marketing setup that’s proactive (not reactive).
In this article, I'll talk about the five best tools you can use to upgrade your competitor analysis for ecommerce. Let's dive in!
What is an ecommerce competitive analysis?
E-commerce competitive analysis is like being a detective for your online store. It's all about understanding what your competitors are doing so you can stay one step ahead. By analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies, you can find opportunities to improve your own business.
This involves looking at various aspects such as their website design, product offerings, pricing, marketing tactics, and customer reviews.
Ecommerce Competitor Analysis Software: What Can You Achieve With It?
Ecommerce competitor analysis software lets you spot trends quickly, identify what your competitors are up to, lets you find creative solutions for marketing fast, and gives you more power under the hood.
Since you don’t operate in a bubble, competitor analysis gives you the keys to anything that your competitors are doing (including what they aren’t doing right). This helps you quickly identify gaps in your own marketing strategy.
Ecommerce competition analysis software helps you understand your market better, gain insights on marketing (and that you won’t get otherwise), and spot industry trends, deep dive into consumer behavior (specific to your niche), and also allows you to set benchmarks that’ll help sustain your growth.
Given the need for rapid (but careful) implementation for competitor analysis, it’s impractical to try to muscle your way through it. That’s why you need handy ecommerce competitor analysis software.
Here’s what a well-built and strategically used ecommerce competitor analysis software can do for you and what you can achieve with it:
Improve Your Complete Marketing Strategy
From knowing what to do “now”, moving on to “what not to do”, and to always knowing what to do “next”, competitor analysis can help you stay on the move. The right eCommerce competitor analysis software helps dissolves marketing and creative bottlenecks and gives you the fuel you need to get started quickly.
Your competitors are already raging, storming the market with new product launches, product offers, and running digital campaigns. Develop a complete marketing strategy by knowing exactly what you should do (and what you should not do).
Identify Content Gaps and Strategy Blind Spots
Your competition is not only running ads and sending out email marketing campaigns but also a steady output when it comes to content marketing.
Websites always stay updated, changes are made on their respective websites to reflect new offers and seasonal pitches.
Blog posts go out each week and there’s a healthy SEO work behind the scenes.
Your marketing doesn’t sound like the above? That’s a strategic blind spot.
Instantly, you now know you have work to do.
Within the realm of content produced by your competitors, find out what’s missing in your strategy.
Identify content gaps, find keywords you didn’t think of targeting, find new keywords or content ideas you missed, and so on.
Find New Audiences
B2C, DTC, and even B2B brands are sometimes blinded by the “reach” their products have.
They often misjudge the huge demand for products outside the limitations they set for themselves.
If you have a solution to a problem, the set of audiences likely to appreciate the solution could be larger than you thought. Your audience might not just be ladies in their 30s to 50s. It could be younger folks, older audiences, Gen Z millennials.
Or, you could find that your audiences are scattered across the world. Your competitors might already be paving the path to reach out to these new audiences.
You couldn’t reach out because you didn’t know. Competitor analysis allows you to find new audiences that you never thought you could.
Discover & Launch New Products
Let’s say you are in the business of making high-quality riding gear for motorcycle enthusiasts. Your products include gloves, helmets, riding jackets, riding shoes, and more.
You find that our competitors, when you do your due diligence and research, also sell slightly niched-down versions of similar products.
Protective leather Jackets for motorcyclists, but with a classic theme--colored jackets, open-face helmets, retro-styled sun shades, and so on.
Riding gear for women.
Riding gear for new motorcyclists.
You get the drift?
Competitor analysis quickly gives you the rundown on what’s selling, what’s not, and the entire inventory of products your competitors have.
With this, you can take a well-researched and educated guess at whether or not you should consider offering or creating such products.
Spy on Competitor Advertising & Creatives
This one, we love. One quick glance at a competitor and you’ll know how their email campaigns are, the kind of SMS marketing messages they send, how they design their landing pages, the subject lines they use for their email marketing campaigns, the creatives used for the ads, and so much more.
Everything you find (or have a need to search for), you can build a list and more of this precise data (according to filters you seat) will automatically populate within that list.
We practically built Panoramata which helps with all of the above, plus angles and hooks. This way or that.
Access all the creative marketing content -- sourced from hundreds of various brands across categories and industries -- channeled and funneled into a single dashboard.
Things you can you track on your ecommerce competitors
Tools have become advanced and there’s now a plethora of information you can spy on your ecommerce competitors.
With the right software, you can get a full picture of their marketing strategy. The pieces that make up this strategy include email marketing, advertising, marketing stack, landing pages, and SEO.
Panoramata helps you improve marketing performance with better creatives, stunning ads, and highly-effective email marketing.
Other tools also monitor Google ads, keywords they rank for, social media content and schedules, backlinks, organic traffic, and ratings.
How to Do Competitive Analysis in Ecommerce
Identify Your Competitors
Start by making a list of your top competitors. These can be direct competitors (those selling similar products) or indirect competitors (those targeting the same audience but with different products).
Analyze Their Website
Visit their websites and take note of their design, user experience, product categories, and overall branding. What stands out? What can you learn from their layout and navigation?
Check Their Product Offerings
Look at the range and quality of products they offer. Are there any gaps in their offerings that you could fill? How do their products compare to yours in terms of features and benefits?
Evaluate Pricing Strategies
Compare their prices with yours. Are they offering discounts, free shipping, or other incentives? Understanding their pricing strategy can help you adjust yours to stay competitive.
Review Their Marketing Tactics
Follow their social media accounts, subscribe to their newsletters, and read their blog posts. How are they engaging with customers? What kind of content are they producing, and how often?
Monitor Customer Feedback
Read customer reviews on their website and other platforms like Amazon or Google Reviews. What are customers saying about their products and services? This can give you insights into their strengths and weaknesses.
Use SEO Tools
Utilize tools like SEMrush to analyze their search engine rankings, keywords, and backlinks. This can help you understand their SEO strategy and find opportunities to improve your own.
Look at Advertising Strategies
Check out their online ads using tools like Panoramata. What kind of ads are they running? What keywords are they targeting? This can give you ideas for your own advertising campaigns.
Analyze Their Social Media Presence
Observe how they interact with their audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. What kind of posts get the most engagement? How often do they post?
Keep an Eye on Innovations
Stay updated on any new features or products they launch. Are they adopting new technologies or trends? Keeping track of their innovations can inspire you to innovate as well.
Why is it better to do competitor tracking on a single platform?
Competitor tracking becomes more convenient when you can track all these marketing pieces in one platform. You only need to sign in once and the information you need is laid out for you, a click away.
It also keeps your workflow organized and is ideal if you’re collaborating with a marketing team. Your efforts will be under one platform so sharing ideas will be seamless.
5 Best Competitor Analysis Tools
Panoramata
Panoramata helps you improve marketing performance with better creatives, stunning ads, and highly-effective email marketing.
It’s primarily a competitor tracking tool that also doubles up as a multi-pronged inspiration board.
You can access any brand and get straight to the brand’s profile along with the respective brand’s marketing assets (including ads, email campaigns, marketing journeys, sales funnels, and landing pages).
Get instant access to the marketing stack in use for each brand, specifics about campaigns (frequency of emails, type of emails, subject lines used for emails), and more.
Sorted by industry, brand type, and more, you don’t have to follow 100+ different brands individually (logging in, checking out, subscribing to their emails, or following brand ads everywhere).
Semrush
Semrush has for a long time now been one admirable Swiss army knife when it comes to SEM, SEO, ads, and social media.
With more than 17+ tools rolled into a single platform, Semrush is perfect for
- SEO audits
- Keyword research
- Content creation (along with it’s “opportunities analysis”, SEO writing assistant, and the “Keyword Magic tool”
- Backlinking analysis and finding linking opportunities for SEO
- On-page SEO and finding opportunities with content strategy that you’d miss otherwise,
- Social media monitoring, social media tracking, and social media posting (on schedule).
- Ad tracking for any website (find out what kind of ads other businesses run)
- Competitive analysis (across the board) -- for ads, content, SEO, marketing strategy, ads on Google, and more.
Ahrefs
While Semrush takes an “all-in-one” approach to marketing and competitor tracking, Ahrefs is another popular tool that focuses squarely on content marketing and SEO with tools such as:
- A high-level dashboard of how your site (or other sites you are tracking) are doing, SEO-wise.
- SiteExplorer (research competitor backlinks and site profiles)
- Keyword Explorer (find winning keywords from their super-large database)
- Site audits (scan your website -- or other websites -- to see how well they do with their SEO)
- Rank Tracker (track ranking on search engines), and
- Content Explorer (find content ideas and opportunities to do well with content marketing)
BuiltWith
Have you ever wondered what platform your competitors are using to host and manage their ecommerce site? Would you like to know if they have their Facebook Pixel (and other tracking pixels) on, and firing? How about the exact stack of marketing and tools your competitors use?
Learn all of that -- and more -- with BuiltWith.
BuiltWith is the “technology lookup” resource and it has been instrumental in letting anyone know the exact tools, hosting platforms, advertising platforms, and anything else connected with each website.
Using Builtwith, you’ll get a clear view of what’s connected to your competitor’s website -- the platform they use (such as Shopify or WordPress), the ad platforms they are on (Facebook? Twitter?), tracking scripts in use, and more.
You'll also get that info on Panoramata as well!
Your competitor's website
Don't overlook this crucial "tool" for competitive analysis: your competitor's website. Though technically it's not a tool, it costs nothing to view and holds a wealth of information you can use to your advantage.
Look at your competitor's homepage, product pages, and about page. See how they position themselves and their USP. Observe their CTAs and product descriptions.
If you can, take a look at their landing pages and the ads connected with them. With a sharp eye, you can amass a lot of data you can use for competitive analysis.
Tools to Find Competitor’s Landing Pages and Analyze Acquisition Channels
To get a deeper understanding of your competitors' strategies, it's essential to find their landing pages and analyze their acquisition channels. Three powerful tools for this are Panoramata, Semrush, and Similarweb.
Semrush
Semrush is a SEO tool that helps you identify your competitors’ top-performing landing pages and analyze their organic and paid search strategies. You can uncover the keywords they are ranking for, see their ad copies, and understand their backlink profile. This information allows you to optimize your own landing pages and improve your search engine visibility.
Similarweb
Similarweb provides generic insights into your competitors' traffic sources and acquisition channels. It shows you where their website traffic is coming from.
Panoramata
Track your competitor’s funnels, from ad to landing page, on one platform using Panoramata. You’ll receive updates on new ads, campaigns, and landing pages automatically on a dashboard so you can always keep tabs on your competitors online strategies without doing it manually.
With its feature-rich platform, Panoramata helps you create smart decisions based on up-to-date data.
By leveraging these tools, you can gain a holistic view of your competitors’ online strategies and make data-driven decisions to enhance your e-commerce business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which tool is best for competitor analysis?
The best competitor analysis tools include Panoramata, Semrush, Ahrefs, and BuiltWith.
How to do competitor analysis in eCommerce?
To conduct a competitor analysis as an ecommerce brand, you first have to identify your objectives and competitors, whether direct or indirect. Then, you can use competitor analysis tools to aid you in your research.
