To rephrase the popular adage, "Know thy competitor".
The benefits of knowing your competitor like you know your own business are manyfold.
If you don't know exactly who your competitors are, what they do, how they're performing, what campaigns they're running, what audiences they're targeting, you've got a lot of digging to do.
Thankfully, the best ecommerce tools will take the weight of your shoulders.
As an e-commerce business, you might or might not need all of these tools (depending on the marketing channels you use), but it’s worth a look.
Automating the time-consuming work of analyzing competitors has obvious advantages, the main one being the time you save subscribing to emails and viewing content individually.
With some of these competitor tools you can also go deep and conduct thorough analyses of your competition, use benchmarking to figure out where you are in your journey, and take necessary steps to grow your business.
Use these competitor tools one after another, or in combinations thereof. You pick.
The Best Ecommerce Competitor Analysis Tools
- The Importance of Competitor Analysis in Ecommerce
- How to do competitor analysis in ecommerce
- Panoramata
- Why it’s better to automate ecommerce competitor analysis
- SpyFu
- SEMRush
- BuzzSumo
- Ahrefs
- Builtwith
- AdSpy
- Feedly
- Tools to find your competitor’s landing pages
- How to find your competitor’s top products
- Start Your Competitor Analysis Today
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What are AI tools for competitor analysis?
- How to find competitors for an ecommerce website?
The Importance of Competitor Analysis in Ecommerce
Why should you carve out time for ecommerce competitor analysis when you’re juggling many things at once?
First, the time spent analyzing your competitors is not wasted.
Competitor analysis shines a light on your own brands’ strengths and weaknesses. Through this, you can fix the areas you’re lacking in before it grows into a bigger issue.
You can also enhance your strong points and see what you have to offer that your competitors do not or don’t do as well.
It’s also important to analyze ecommerce competitors to better understand your customers and what they want.
There might be a need that they’re not filling. Addressing that need will give you a headstart on your competitors.
Closely observing your competitors may lead you to more discoveries such as overlooked competition you didn’t consider before.
Additionally, comparing yourself with competitors gives you benchmarks for future growth. It can serve as inspiration, if they’re better than you in some ways, to reach your full business potential.
You can even learn from smaller competitors as they may have fresh ideas you haven’t thought of yet.
How to do competitor analysis in ecommerce
You need to do competitor analysis— and you’re probably already doing it. The only thing is, it might take you too much time to do this correctly. Good thing there are solutions for this!
You can go ahead and manually track every changes and updates your competitors published recently: expect at least 15 to 20 minutes per competitor (if you’d like to see their homepage, recent emails if you subscribed to their newsletters, recent ads because you need to visit each ad library, etc.).
Add another 20 minutes per competitor if you’re going deep into spotting trends, understanding why and how they’ve made recent changes, and collecting their best assets.
With Panoramata, you can do this instantly in a few minutes, however many competitors you’d like to track. Yay!
Just sign up, track your competitors directly and your dashboard will instantly feature this up-to-date data with clear summaries of their most recent updates.
Don’t forget to sign up for their newsletters using Panoramata and follow their social media channels to stay updated on their latest promotions and customer engagement tactics.
Next, leverage digital tools to get deeper insights. Analyze their SEO strategies and discover which keywords they rank for. Use SimilarWeb to get an overview of their traffic sources and audience demographics.
Social listening tools can help you monitor their social media activity and see what customers are saying about them.
By combining these insights, you can uncover their strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities for your own business, and ultimately stay one step ahead in the competitive e-commerce landscape.
Without further ado, here are 9 of the best eCommerce tools for checking up on your competitors:
Panoramata
If email marketing is your thing (on top of landing pages, ads, paid search campaigns, and SEO), Panoramata is a powerful tool that helps you keep track of leading e-commerce brands.
For each brand (in sorted ecommerce verticals and categories), you get a sneak peek of actual email messages sent, subject lines used, frequency of emails, ads, landing pages, website changes (with snapshots), SMS campaigns, and more.
Build inspiration lists, study lists, or track lists with Panoramata and track your competition the smart way.
Why it’s better to automate ecommerce competitor analysis
Automating the time-consuming work of analyzing competitors has obvious advantages, the main one being the time you save subscribing to emails and viewing content individually.
Collecting data is an enormous task that automated tools can do faster and often better than we can. Making sure the content you collect is up-to-date is even more of a time suck because you have to visit those pages individually.
With automated tools, you also expand the amount of data you can collect on your competitors. The quality of data goes up, too, because automation reduces error and is unbiased.
Lastly, analyzing data by yourself takes skill and effort that are better off spent on other tasks. Automated tools can detect trends and give an overview of details in a snap.
The question is better framed as why shouldn’t you automate competitor analysis and give yourself a break?
If you want to save time and effort, you’re in good hands with Panoramata, the platform that monitors competitors for you in real-time and automatically and gives you unlimited inspiration for your marketing campaigns.
SpyFu
SpyFu is a comprehensive tool that provides data on your competitors' search marketing campaigns, including keyword rankings, ad copy, and website traffic.
It's specifically focused on SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which includes paid ads (PPC) and organic search analysis (SEO).
SEMrush
Semrush is another powerful Swiss-army style tool that offers a wide range of features for tracking your competitors' online marketing efforts. This includes data on website traffic (your own, and that of your competition), backlinks, PPC ads, and social media engagement.
With powerful features, deep indexing, and a wide library of websites covered, SEMrush truly helps you uncover who your competitors are.
More importantly, Semrush can also be a valuable tool for making your own PPC campaigns and search optimization better.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a powerful ally when it comes to media intelligence, social intelligence, and to help you track what’s happening online (with your own brand and also with what’s happening with your competitors).
Discover who’s ranking (or is popular) for content, pieces of content that get maximum social shares, find influencers for your brand (or track the influencers working with your competition), and more.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that offers data on website traffic, backlinks, and keyword rankings.
One of the more interesting tools to use for finding out what your competitors are ranking for on search is their “Site Explorer”.
But then, there are several other tools that can help you rank better on search, get more traffic, and make search marketing work for you.
Take advantage of ‘keyword explorer’, ‘content explorer’, ‘rank tracker’, and ‘site audit’ features to improve your search ranking game.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides data on website traffic, top marketing channels, and demographics of your competitors all in a single dashboard.
SimilarWeb has a full range of tools available for practically all kinds of research (including competitor analysis and competitor intelligence).
Use it to conduct benchmarking, company research, market research, audience analysis, competitive analysis, app intelligence, and so much more.
Builtwith
Want to know the technology or platform your competitors use?
Would you like to find out exactly what kind of e-commerce platform they use, ad networks they are associated with, and so on?
BuiltWith is a “technology lookup” beast. It helps you get instant information on the website your competitors use, the technology they take advantage of, the ad networks they depend on, CRM integrations, APIs in use, the email marketing tools they use, and much more.
AdSpy
AdSpy is one of the largest libraries or databases of Facebook and Instagram ads in the world.
If you ever wanted to find out the exact social media campaigns your competitors run, AdSpy can deliver.
With AdSpy, you get to discover compelling new campaigns, scout for new audiences or new markets, uncover new products, discover your competitors’ campaigns, and monitor your competitors’ brands.
Feedly
Want to get a glance on what your competitors publish on a regular basis, without you having to go to each competitor website and read?
That’s where Feedly comes in.
Feedly is a social media aggregator that lets you track your competitors' social media activity in one place. You can monitor PR mentions, news articles, independent bloggers, other publications, and more.
If you wanted to, you can create lists and specify exactly what you want to track and the sources you want to generate the feeds from.
Tools to find your competitor’s landing pages
Panoramata
To make finding landing pages even easier, sign up to Panoramata and search for your competitor. This will lead you to a page dedicated to their marketing activities, including landing pages.
For each landing page, you’ll also see the ads associated with them. This removes the tedious work of locating each landing page manually.
Meta Ad Library
The Meta Ad Library (formerly called Facebook Ad Library) is an excellent source for finding your competitor’s landing pages on Facebook and Instagram.
You can look up your competitor’s page and the ad library will lead you to the ads they’re running and the ads they’ve published before. You can then click on the ads and find the landing pages they link to.
How to find your competitor’s top products
Your competitor’s top product is usually their flagship product, the one they’re known for or the first product they launch.
If you’re still unsure about which products are performing best for them, you can find out by doing some sleuthing on their website.
A caveat: this only works on websites powered by Shopify. Use Panoramata to find out what your competitor is using to run their website.
Next, input this URL: htttps://competitorwebsitename.com/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling
Replace “competitorwebsitename” with your competitor’s domain name.The products in the search results are their top products.
Start Your Competitor Analysis Today
Use any of these tools (and there are more) to help you create a comprehensive marketing strategy for your e-commerce business.
What are some of the best competitor analysis tools you can’t get enough of?
Frequently Asked Questions
What are AI tools for competitor analysis?
AI tools for competitor analysis leverage advanced algorithms to provide deeper insights and predictive analytics.
Notable tools include Crimson Hexagon, Brandwatch, Gong.io, and Pathmatics, which dissects digital advertising strategies, spending, and creatives across various channels.
These tools help businesses gain a comprehensive understanding of their competitive landscape.
How to find competitors for an ecommerce website?
To find competitors for an e-commerce website, start by searching for your main products or services on search engines and note which companies appear in the top results.
You can also use tools like Panoramata, SimilarWeb, and Ahrefs to identify websites with similar traffic and audience profiles, ensuring you have a comprehensive list of relevant competitors.
