The term benchmark – and benchmarking as we know it now– didn’t exist before the 80s.
Can you guess where it came from?
The word started as a type of survey marker that was etched on stone.
People in the leveling industry placed benchmarks in sites across the country to have a stable reference point for heights. These benchmarks are second to none in accuracy so they were used as the standard.
For your business, it’s the same thing:
Benchmarks are used as the standard of comparison, the yardstick or frame of reference to drive a business forward and reach goals. You can use benchmarking in the same way for ecommerce.
In external benchmarking, you can gauge your business’ performance using predetermined metrics and compare these metrics to your peers. Only then can your business or organization make informed plans to improve an aspect of its performance.
In other words, when you compare your business with the best businesses in your industry using specific metrics, you can see how you stack up using cold hard data and find ways to improve.
Here’s the truth: there’s no wrong or right way to do ecommerce benchmarking; there are only efficient and inefficient ways.
Several tools have been developed to help benchmark companies against each other and these tools have been invaluable to marketers. If you’re looking for a suitable tool for your goals, you’re in luck because, in this article, we’ll discuss common ecommerce benchmarking tools and how they work.
Let’s go!
Benchmark Your Competitors Efficiently
- What benchmarking is and why should you do it
- Benefits of Benchmarking
- What can you track when benchmarking your competitors?
- Ecommerce Benchmarking Tools
- Panoramata
- Similarweb
- Your own inbox
- Frequently Asked Questions
- How do you use benchmarking tools?
- How do you use benchmarking effectively?
What benchmarking is and why should you do it
Let’s keep it simple.
Benchmarking is measuring strategies or metrics of several companies and compare them together.
That’s it.
You compare, measure, and then you can analyze.
You can do this as an external actor (What’s happening on this market?) or as a part of this market (What are my competitors doing?).
We’ll focus here on the latter, as this is making the benchmarking process much more useful. The next questions you should ask yourself, when you gather all this data and put it together is: How can I make sense of all this? What should I do then?
Your goal is to improve your processes, your strategies and your products, based on what the competition is doing.
Benchmarking them, you can de-risk your own strategies and processes, because you can:
- Focus on what seems to be working for competitors
- Avoid doing things they’ve stopped doing
- Position yourself at the right level, given what your target audience can access from your competitiors.
Exciting right?
Let’s focus on this a bit more:
Benefits of Benchmarking
Finding out how you rank against your competitors, on multiple dimentions (think marketing, ads, emails, offers, etc.) has three benefits:
- It reveals gaps in your peformance (what are they doing better?)
- It uncovers content gaps and opportunities in your marketing channels (such as emails and ads) (what are they doing that I’m not?)
- It validates your unique value proposition, if you are outpacing your competitor (what does our common audience think about them and how should I be better positioned?)
- It shows things you might be doing that you can question, or double down on (what am I the only one doing? should I continue?)
Although benchmarking takes time, its benefits outweigh the effort.
What can you track when benchmarking your competitors?
You can use several metrics to assess your performance against your competitors. These will depend on your goals and can include:
- Conversion rate
- Average order value
- Cart abandonment rate
- Average repeat customer rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Site traffic
- Retention rate
- Churn rate
- Page load time
- Email open rate
- Email click-through rate
- Time on site
- Bounce rate
- Average inventory sold per day
Ecommerce Benchmarking Tools
Panoramata
Panoramata is a platform dedicated to competitor tracking and benchmarking. It monitors newsletters, email flows, SMS, ads, landing pages, and websites for you automatically so you don’t have to do it yourself.
You don’t have to sign up for newsletters only to have them clog your inbox, stalk websites, and landing pages piece by piece, or remember to take a look at a competitor’s ad library before an important campaign.
It’s all done for you automatically and in one place.
The result? You save time and resources and get actionable insights based on real data.
Panoramata breaks down your competitors’ marketing strategies, helps you gather ideas, and quickly and easily benchmarks your business with its peers. Plus, it’s made for ecommerce marketers by ecommerce marketers.
Panoramata’s features and capabilities include:
- A dashboard for a real-time overview of your competitors’ published marketing assets
- Benchmarks that allow you to compare brands automatically against each other
- Follow brands you’re interested in
- Search through emails, flows, SMS, and ads
- A curated ads database for Tiktok, Meta, Google and Pinterest
- Historical data and statistics of landing pages and their ads
- Save and share inspiration lists
- Recommendations and Inspiration Searches so you never run out of ideas
And the list is just the tip of the iceberg.
If you want to benchmark yourself against competitors and keep your marketing sharp, Panoramata will allow you to reach your goals faster.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is an ecommerce benchmarking and web analytics tool that allows you to track your competitors’ website traffic sources, audience metrics, and keyword performance, among others.
You can even get into the details of each feature. For example, for website traffic, you can see which country or city visitors are coming from. You can also check which visitors are coming from organic sources, paid searches, or social media.
Rankings are another useful feature available on SimilarWeb. It allows you to compare your website performance with your competitors. You can go deeper and use SimilarWeb to peek at your competitors’ marketing efforts and their effectiveness.
SEO and content marketers will find these features useful because you can look up any website and instantly see total visits, bounce rates, pages per visit, average visit duration, and the industry they’re part of.
You can also see a website’s global, country, and category rankings, as well as similarly ranked sites.
If you want to benchmark yourself against more competitors, you’ll easily find it on SimilarWeb.
That being said, SimilarWeb has its share of disadvantages, the most salient of which is data accuracy. It’s not a hundred percent reliable, especially for small websites, and real-time data isn’t available, either.
Another con is that it doesn’t track traffic from mobile devices, only desktops. That can be a huge downside because people use smartphones more often than their desktop devices.
SimilarWeb also has a glaring lack of integrations, which can impede your workflow if you’re using several tools for competitor benchmarking and analysis.
Your own inbox
You might be overlooking a common ecommerce benchmarking tool: your email inbox. It’s handy for benchmarking email campaigns and is easy to set up. Just sign up to your competitors’ newsletters–using your personal email address, of course–and wait for the emails to roll in.
This tool takes some patience because you won’t get this data automatically. However, you’ll notice trends in their email strategy such as frequency of emails, weekly and daily average number of email marketing messages sent, email schedules, and subject lines.
There’s no wrong or right way to do ecommerce benchmarking; there are only efficient and inefficient ways.
You’ll also learn what voice or style your competitor uses to connect with its target audience, which tells you their brand positioning. Aside from those, it could be helpful to observe the copy, images, CTAs, and discount offers they use in their emails.
As convenient as this benchmarking tool is, it’s really not efficient nor does it give you a holistic overview of your competitors’ email marketing.
For example, you have no access to their spam scores, software used, and actionable insights. It also takes a lot of time to manually sign up for newsletters, time that could be better used elsewhere.
Google Analytics can also be used for ecommerce benchmarking and you probably know that already. It’s a treasure trove of useful data about your website’s performance over time and how you compare to your peers.
It provides information you can use to improve website performance, spot trends, and come up with solutions to issues your brand faces.
To enable benchmarking in Google Analytics, go to Admin and then Account Settings. Enable “Benchmarking”. Click the box next to “Modeling contributions and business insights” and then hit Save.
But there’s a caveat to this. Google Analytics doesn’t compare you solely with your competitors. Its capabilities can only take from a broad range of other potentially non-relevant sites (all anonymous).
The switch to Google Analytics 4 is a timesuck, too, because you have to refamiliarize yourself with the platform’s new iteration.
The metrics and reports can be overwhelming if you’re a newbie to Google Analytics. It’s a drain of time and resources especially since you have to do manual research for benchmarking.
Historical data won’t be migrated either so you can only access data made when a site has started using Google Analytics 4.
We hope this gave you insights into top ecommerce benchmarking tools and whether they’re a good fit for you. Happy benchmarking!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you use benchmarking tools?
To use benchmarking tools, start by selecting key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your business, such as conversion rates, average order value, and customer acquisition costs.
Input your data and compare it against industry standards or direct competitors to identify areas where you excel and areas needing improvement.
How do you use benchmarking effectively?
To use benchmarking effectively, regularly monitor and update your benchmarks to stay aligned with industry trends and changes.
Analyze the data to uncover actionable insights, set realistic performance goals, and implement strategies to improve your metrics based on the comparison with top performers in your field.
