If you’re wondering why your efforts to promote your products online have been in vain or why your competitors are running full steam ahead while you languish in their wake, you might want to look into competitor benchmarking.
It’s a must-do for any marketing team who wants to stay current, tap into opportunities, and boost revenue.
But what is ecommerce benchmarking and how do you do it?
In this article, we’ll talk about how to benchmark your competitors in just five steps. So easy peasy that you can get started today.
Without further ado, let’s dive in, shall we?
What is competitive benchmarking?
Competitive benchmarking is the practice of comparing your company’s performance against other companies and the industry you belong to using specific metrics.
These metrics (or benchmarks) include
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates
- Average order value
- Customer lifetime value
- Customer acquisition costs
- Revenue
- Search engine results
- Customer ratings
You can also compare strategies, products offered, and practices and see how you’re performing according to the standards your competitors have set.
6 Benefits of Competitor Benchmarking in Ecommerce
Staying ahead of the competition is essential for business growth. That's where benchmarking your e-commerce competitors comes into play, offering a wealth of benefits to savvy brands and marketers.
Adapt to changes and trends
Firstly, benchmarking provides invaluable insights into industry trends, allowing you to stay informed about the latest innovations, consumer preferences, and market shifts.
By keeping a close eye on your competitors' strategies and performance metrics, you can identify emerging opportunities and potential threats, enabling you to adapt and evolve your own approach accordingly.
See your brand’s position clearly
Secondly, benchmarking helps you understand where you stand in relation to your competitors, allowing you to identify your strengths and weaknesses more effectively.
By comparing key metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, and customer engagement, you can gain a clearer picture of how your brand stacks up against the competition.
This insight not only highlights areas where you excel but also uncovers opportunities for improvement, enabling you to fine-tune your strategies and enhance your competitive advantage.
By systematically analyzing your rivals' strategies, performance metrics, and market positioning, you can gain valuable insights that inform and refine your own business strategy.
Unveil best practices and unleash creativity
Finally, benchmarking your e-commerce competitors can inspire innovation and creativity within your own business.
By analyzing your competitors' products, marketing campaigns, and customer experiences, you can uncover new ideas and best practices that you may not have considered before.
Whether it's refining your product offerings, optimizing your website, or fine-tuning your marketing messaging, benchmarking provides a valuable source of inspiration for driving continuous improvement and staying ahead of the curve in the e-commerce landscape.
Monitor competitors
Benchmarking provides a structured way to track competitors over time rather than relying on sporadic observations. This consistency helps you spot patterns and shifts in strategy, giving you a deeper understanding of their long-term goals.
Armed with this knowledge, you can refine your approach to maintain a competitive edge and avoid being blindsided by industry changes.
Maximize sales and revenue
By benchmarking, you identify gaps in your offerings and uncover opportunities to enhance your products or services, which can lead to increased sales. For instance, if competitors are bundling products or offering loyalty rewards, you can implement similar strategies to boost customer retention.
Learning from their successes and mistakes minimizes trial-and-error efforts on your part, allowing you to allocate resources effectively.
Moreover, benchmarking helps you set realistic yet ambitious sales targets based on industry standards. By understanding where your competitors excel, you can adopt best practices and refine your pricing, promotions, and marketing strategies.
This not only increases your revenue potential but also ensures that your business stays aligned with customer expectations and market demands.
Avoid getting left behind
Failing to stay updated on competitors’ innovations in a rapidly evolving market can cause your business to lose relevance. Benchmarking ensures you’re always aware of the latest industry trends and customer preferences.
For example, if a competitor adopts a new technology or enters a niche market, benchmarking allows you to evaluate whether similar changes are beneficial for your business.
This minimizes the risk of falling behind and helps you stay ahead of potential disruptors in your industry. By benchmarking regularly, you can anticipate shifts in the competitive landscape and pivot your strategies accordingly.
How to select competitors to benchmark yourself against
Selecting the right competitors to benchmark against is critical to obtaining actionable insights. Here's how to choose those competitors wisely.
Start with your direct competitors
Start by identifying direct competitors who share your target audience, product offerings, and market size. These businesses are your closest rivals and often provide the most relevant data.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce fashion retailer, you’d focus on other brands targeting similar customer demographics rather than general retailers or high-end luxury brands.
Include aspirational competitors
Next, consider benchmarking against aspirational competitors—those slightly ahead of you in the market. These companies represent where you want to be in the near future, making their strategies an excellent source of inspiration.
For instance, a mid-sized SaaS company might analyze the marketing tactics of a larger, more established competitor in the same niche. This can help you identify scalable strategies and set realistic goals for growth.
Consider indirect competitors as well
It’s also valuable to include indirect competitors in your analysis. These are businesses outside your immediate industry that target similar customer needs.
For example, a coffee shop might benchmark against a juice bar since both appeal to health-conscious consumers. Including these competitors broadens your perspective and helps you discover innovative approaches to customer engagement and market differentiation.
Ask yourself how difficult it will be to gather their data
Lastly, ensure that the competitors you select provide accessible and measurable data. This includes publicly available information, such as website traffic, social media activity, and customer reviews.
Tools like Panoramata can streamline this process by consolidating competitor data in one place, enabling you to benchmark efficiently. By carefully selecting a mix of direct, aspirational, and indirect competitors, you can create a comprehensive benchmarking strategy that drives meaningful improvements.
How to Conduct Competitor Benchmarking
Step 1: Set goals and objectives
The first step in benchmarking your ecommerce competitors is to define your goals and objectives.
Ask yourself what you want your brand to achieve through benchmarking. Make sure your objectives are clear.
Examples of potential objectives include increasing newsletter signups or sales, improving performance or strategy, and having better processes.
Step 2: List down your competitors (direct or indirect)
Next, make a list of your competitors you want to benchmark yourself against.
You might find the process of selecting competitors overwhelming or confusing. There are several ways to approach it.
You can choose your direct competitors or your peers who are most similar to you and are going after the same target market.
Alternatively, you can opt for bigger fish–the companies who are best in class in your industry–and use them as inspiration.
On the other hand, you can also benchmark your brand against up-and-coming ecommerce companies. This helps you become aware of potential threats that can become bigger rivals in the future.
Ensure you also look beyond direct competitors and consider those offering similar products or catering to the same demographic.
Step 3: Choose your metrics
Now that you have your goals, objectives, and list of competitors, it’s time to determine the metrics you’ll measure in your benchmarking.
Examples of metrics you’ll want to track are:
- Website traffic
- Average organic traffic
- Market share of traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Social media followers
- Social media engagement
- Average ads published
- Average emails sent
- Spam score
- Email types sent
- Average price
- Total products
The metrics you track should be relevant to your goals. If you don’t know where to start, you should try benchmarking your competitor’s ads, emails, product prices, landing pages, and software.
This gives you a holistic view of a brand’s performance and shows where you’re at relative to them.
Benchmark ads
Gauge your competitors’ advertising performance using metrics like average ads published, ad volume, ad diversity (images or video), and unique copy.
Benchmark emails
To measure email performance, collect data on the average number of emails sent, spam scores, email types (promo, relational, product, launch, survey), and email size.
Benchmark prices
Research what products your competitors offer and how they price them. Track average prices and total products.
Observe their product categories, range, and pricing methods. Do they position their products as budget-friendly, luxury, or midrange?
This information can help you adjust your pricing strategy.
Benchmark landing pages
You can also benchmark landing pages and the ads associated with these pages to see what your competitor’s funnel looks like.
Benchmark software
Lastly, it’s worth looking into the software your competitors use to run their website for additional information.
Step 4: Choose your benchmarking tools and gather information
You have access to your brand’s metrics but the challenge is getting ahold of your competitors’ information. These metrics are confidential.
Also, the process can be complex and time-consuming if you decide to gather data manually. Nonetheless, you can research any available company reports online, as well as articles and press releases.
SEO and social media metrics are readily available but to get a full view, you need to upgrade to paid tools.
Competitor benchmarking tools like Panoramata will streamline this step so you don’t have to collect all this information yourself.
These tools also have the advantage of keeping your data in one place so you are more organized and can access and analyze them easily.
Step 5: Analyze results and implement
Finally, it’s time to analyze the data you’ve collected by comparing your information to that of your competitors side by side. You can use competitor analysis and benchmarking tools like Panoramata to automate this.
You can then implement the insights you’ve obtained from the reports.
Make sure to track and benchmark regularly to keep your data fresh. Repeat the benchmarking process as needed.
Main Metrics Things to Look For When Competitor Benchmarking and How to Source Data
Using some key metrics to benchmark against competitors, you can prevent yourself from drifting into the ‘Amazon forest’ equivalent of the web.
Knowing what to look for when you focus on competitive analytics is just as important as competitive analytics itself, the tools you use for competitive analysis, and the motivation for competitor research.
Let’s say you pick up a few tools like Panoramata, Similarweb, Semrush, and many others. What exactly do you look out for?
Let’s explore the main metrics, and things to look for to benchmark yourself against your competition:
Ads, Ad Volume, & Active Ad Networks
Consider this sneaky if you will, but there are several ways (and appropriate tools -- with some provided by major traffic sources such as Meta and Google) to find the ad volume and active ad networks that each of your competitors use.
- Get retargeted: Get to each of your competitors’ sites and get “retargeted” -- with ads following you for a while after your visit. Immediately get to see their ads and the fact that they are retargeting (if they are).
- Devour ad libraries: Maintained by major traffic sources such as Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and others. Meta itself has an ad library and a set of tools such as Library API, Ad library, ad data set, and more. Similarly, Google Transparency Center can provide you with tons of information and data about the ads your competitors are running.
- Browse Google & Social networks, as you do: Just browsing any of the social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Pinterest will introduce you to several ads (some of these from your direct competitors). Instead of casually browsing, take notes: What are they advertising? What are they offering? Who are they trying to reach?
- Use competitive research tools: Tools like Panoramata, Semrush, Similarweb, Adbeat, Spyfu, BigSpy, and Minea from AdSpy can all help you spy on competitors’ ads fast. These tools are purpose-built to help you uncover golden nuggets of information on your competitors (which would be otherwise hard to find).
Email Volume & Email Deliverability and List Size
Log into Panoramata and you can practically use a magnifying glass to dissect, open, see, and learn from all of the email marketing campaigns that your competitors run.
This includes email design, email copy (content), subject lines used for email marketing, the frequency of emails sent, spam score for each of the subject lines used, and even their complete email marketing calendar.
Designs, offers, creatives, email copy — it’s all there for you to get inspired by. Choose from your known competitors or those that you didn’t even know existed.
Panoramata will show entire lists of brands in your industry, other niches or industries, and more.
Creatives, Angles, Brand Voice & Style
For the most part — across all creative types such as ads and emails — it’s the creatives (defined as a mix of visuals such as images or videos along with ad text or email text) that you’ll see first.
Benchmark your own creatives against that of your competitors — how do they use their brand colors, brand voice, and style within their creatives?
What do the designs look like? What kind of copy (or content) do they use?
Next, look at angles: if they have one offer, how many different ways are they making that offer? Do they tend to use several different ways to make offers or to create ads?
SEO Profile & Organic Social Growth
One of the more “long-term” things to look out for and benchmark your brand against that of your competitors is the ever-changing SEO profile and social media growth of your competition — driven by your competitors’ consistent output of content, social media efforts, other content marketing strategies, and search engine optimization efforts.
Metrics for benchmarking — considering SEO profile and growth — is not “instant”, however. This aspect of competitive analysis requires a “time-based” and long-term approach.
Create lists on Panoramata to track your competitors’ SEO profiles and see how they grow over time. For truly deep analysis for SEO, consider full-fledged SEM analysis tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs.
Pricing & Offers
Looking out for competitor pricing (for similar products) in your niche is an excellent benchmark to look out for and to keep tabs on.
Using these pricing benchmarks, you’ll catch yourself if you are pricing too low and also know how to position your products — given how your competitors do it.
In each of the asset types you look at — including ads, websites, landing pages, and emails — Spot pricing and the offers being made.
What are products usually priced at? What kind of discounts are your competitors giving away? How are these offers being made?
Watch out for aspects such as tone, style, voice, calls-to-action used, and more.
Competitor Benchmarking Mistakes to Avoid
1. Comparing Yourself to the Wrong Competitors
Benchmarking against competitors that are too dissimilar in size, resources, or market position can lead to misleading insights.
For example, a small startup comparing itself to a global enterprise may set unrealistic goals that are unattainable with its current capabilities. This mismatch can waste resources and create frustration within the team.
To avoid this mistake, focus on selecting competitors that operate in a similar niche, cater to the same audience, and share comparable business models.
It’s also helpful to analyze companies slightly ahead of you in the market, as their strategies are often more actionable and relevant to your growth stage.
Ensure the competitors you benchmark against provide data that can lead to meaningful, achievable improvements for your business.
2. Relying on Outdated or Inaccurate Data
Using old or incorrect data when benchmarking can result in flawed conclusions. Marketing strategies, industry trends, and consumer behaviors change rapidly, and basing decisions on outdated information can lead you down the wrong path.
For instance, if you analyze a competitor’s pricing strategy that is no longer in effect, your adjustments may misalign with current market conditions.
To prevent this, ensure the data you use for benchmarking is up-to-date and verified. Regularly review sources and utilize tools like Panoramata, which provides real-time insights into competitors’ marketing strategies.
This ensures you’re making decisions based on accurate, relevant information, giving your business a competitive edge.
3. Overemphasizing Quantitative Metrics While Ignoring Qualitative Insights
Focusing solely on numerical metrics like revenue, traffic, or social media followers can give an incomplete picture of your competitors' strategies. These figures don’t always capture customer sentiment, brand loyalty, or the impact of creative campaigns.
Overemphasizing numbers can lead to decisions that lack nuance, such as blindly copying tactics without understanding their broader context.
To avoid this, balance quantitative data with qualitative insights. For example, analyze customer reviews, social media engagement, and brand messaging to understand how competitors connect with their audience.
This holistic approach allows you to make informed decisions that align with both your brand identity and your customers’ expectations.
Get started with ecommerce competitive benchmarking
In conclusion, benchmarking your e-commerce competitors is not just a strategic necessity but a powerful tool for driving growth and success in today's competitive landscape.
By systematically analyzing your rivals' strategies, performance metrics, and market positioning, you can gain valuable insights that inform and refine your own business strategy.
Armed with this knowledge, you can identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and stay ahead of the curve, ultimately positioning your e-commerce brand for long-term success.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the differences between competitor analysis and competitor benchmarking?
Competitor analysis focuses on understanding a competitor’s strategies, strengths, and weaknesses in detail. It’s often used to identify opportunities or threats in specific areas, like pricing or marketing.
Competitor benchmarking, on the other hand, is a comparative process that measures your performance against others to identify gaps and set actionable goals. While analysis is about observation, benchmarking is about comparison and improvement.
How do you benchmark against competitors?
Benchmarking against competitors involves identifying key players in your industry, analyzing their strategies and performance metrics, and using the insights gained to inform your own business strategy.
This process entails evaluating various aspects such as website performance, product offerings, pricing, marketing tactics, and customer feedback.
Who should be on the benchmark competitor list?
Your benchmark competitor list should include direct competitors who offer similar products or services to your target audience.
Additionally, consider including indirect competitors who may cater to the same needs or desires through alternative solutions.
Aim to cover a diverse range of competitors across various market segments to gain a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape.
How to do ecommerce competitor analysis?
To conduct e-commerce competitor analysis, start by identifying your main competitors within your industry or niche.
Then, gather data on their website performance, product offerings, pricing strategies, and marketing tactics.
Finally, analyze this information to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, allowing you to refine your own e-commerce strategy and stay competitive in the market.
