Brands don’t live in a bubble and staying ahead of the competition through competitive analysis is more important than ever.
Analysis always involves finding and monitoring your competitor’s display ads and email marketing campaigns, both of which are huge pieces of the puzzle when deciphering your competitor’s marketing strategy.
But that’s easier said than done. Competitive analysis tools can be pricey and manual competitor email monitoring is time-consuming and tedious work.
If you choose to skip it entirely, you’re also at a loss. The lack of insight into competitors' strategies can leave you feeling stuck, unable to optimize your own campaigns effectively.
To capture the attention of potential customers and thrive in your industry, you need to create ads and emails that will connect with your audience.
By learning how to uncover and analyze your competitors' emails and ads, you can gain the competitive edge needed to boost your own marketing success.
In this article, we will explore effective strategies for ad and email competitor monitoring so you can find your competitor’s emails and ads quickly and use them to refine your own campaigns.
Let’s dive in!
How to Find Your Competitor’s Ads and Email Marketing Campaigns
Who should you track? (competitors or not)
It’s important to whittle down the noise to get exactly what you want from competitor tracking. Before you learn how to find competitor emails and ads, it makes sense to zero down on the exact set of companies or brands you want to track and why you follow these brands.
1. Industry Leaders and Famous Brands
Some large or well-known ecommerce businesses can provide you with overall inspiration for organic content strategy, email marketing automation, and advertising (including display ads).
2. Competitors Who Are Good at Retargeting
Specific competitors might be excellent at “making people return to the shop” with effective automated retargeting ads and retargeting email campaigns. Track them for their retention strategies and look at their email marketing/automations flows.
3. Competitors Who Spend The Big Bucks
A few of your competitors might be known for spending more on ads and being aggressive on their acquisition channels. Check their ads, their landing pages and how they setup their whole funnel, including their welcome email automation flow.
A note on tracking your competitor's funnels:
We've seen huge benefits in tracking your competitor's funnels. This can unlock growth opportunities quite quickly for you.
How does this work?
Well, the goal would be to track their whole funnel, rather than emails, ads, or their website individually.
You can do this by identifying:
- their most popular ads
- the landing pages they're using as a destination page for these ads
- their checkout/purchase flow
You'll notice something right away that the most powerful brands have developed over the months very specific funnels for targeted niches inside their audiences with specific ads, emails and landing pages.
Tracking funnels helps you understand the opportunities they're betting on right now to grow.
This is when it’s a no-brainer to use effective tools such as Panoramata to help you get a sense of a brand marketing strategy, and then create specific themed lists or tagged smart lists for your own inspiration.
Get an edge: track your competitors
Competitor tracking—also called competitor research or competitor analysis —is a detailed study of what your competitors are doing.
How your competitor brands are perceived by customers, how they sell, and how they position products directly affect your own marketing because this is what your audience is seeing as well.
Tracking competition and learning from them helps you have an edge over them. Making competitor tracking a part of your overall marketing strategy pays off in the long run, helps you get creative ideas without trying too hard, and allows you to find angles you might have missed.
On Panoramata, you'll have a whole platform designed to help you track all your competitors seamlessly in a single place.
Here's how it works:
How to Check Your Competitor’s Email Marketing Campaigns
The most common way to snoop on your competitor’s email marketing campaigns is by signing up to their newsletter. You can find these sign-up links on their website or social media platforms.
If you have several competitors you want to track, this can get cumbersome really quickly.
On top of that, if you want a clean inbox, these newsletters will make sure that never happens. Alternately, you can just create a burner email account dedicated to your competitor’s email marketing content.
However, Panoramata streamlines this process by doing the sign-ups for you and updating your dashboard in real time when your competitor sends a new email. You’ll also get previous emails the brand has sent to their subscribers—something you can’t receive from manual sign-ups.
This information goes straight to your Panoramata dashboard so you don’t need to create an additional email address for your sleuthing or have countless emails to go through.
It’s in one place for you to track so a cluttered inbox will be a thing of the past. Yay to organization!
How to Find Your Competitor’s Ads
There are three ways to access your competitor’s ads, namely:
- Panoramata
- Meta Ad Library
- Google Ads Transparency Center
Panoramata has a searchable database from thousands of brands. The ads it tracks come from multiple platforms including Google Display, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest.
You can look up your competitor’s ads in an instant and get all the ads they’re publishing on the most popular ad networks. It’s a more convenient way to monitor competitor ads because you don’t have to deal with ad libraries and take manual screenshots or store them in a Figma file.
You can view the ads (even if they’re unpublished) organize the ads into shareable lists, view the landing pages that each ad leads to, and search by industry, language, networks, and asset type.
Meta Ad Library has a repository of ads published on Meta platforms, namely Facebook and Instagram.
You can look up your competitor on Meta Ad Library and see their ads (currently running and past ads) and information about each ad such as if it has any variations, when the ad was launched, and the platform it was published on.
Google has a similar database for Google ads which they call Google Ads Transparency Center. You can search by advertiser or website name and filter results by time, location and platform such as Google Search and Youtube.
How to Track Competitors on Panoramata
Set up alerts & track snapshots for time-sensitive periods
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays are all big days for ecommerce brands.
On top of these, there could be several reasons why any of your competitors can deploy changes to their email marketing campaigns, marketing journeys, sales funnels, and ads.
They might make changes to their landing pages, websites, and more.
Thing is: they will.
But during Black Friday, you probably have something else to do than checking which specific changes they've made on their ads or their website.
Panoramata can do it all for you automatically: almost instantly, you can get a feel for these changes. Set up alerts as to when these changes happen. Make use of our helpful features to quickly visualize the changes made by any brand that you follow.
Track strategic marketing shifts
Learning and getting a sneak peek into what--and how--your competing ecommerce brands are doing during these crucial periods is essential for you to benchmark your own branding, marketing efforts, and more.
- When exactly do your competing brands start campaigns before the holiday season begins?
- When there’s no seasonal push (or when it’s not the season), what kind of email campaigns and ads are rolled out?
- How are holiday-specific campaigns different from regular marketing campaigns?
- Are the ads and email campaigns treated differently -- with new offers, angles, or ideas -- compared to regular campaigns?
- What are the primary traffic sources for ad campaigns that your competition uses? What email services does your competition use?
Apart from learning overall marketing from your competitors, you can do more: track your competitors' websites for changes (if any).
Keep a tab on any major strategic shifts, marketing changes, ad campaign reversals, new campaigns rolled out, new angles for old campaigns, and more.
Track more brands than you can keep up with by using Panoramata. Get your finger on the pulse, stay alert, and always be in the know as to actual email marketing campaigns being sent, subject lines used, ads rolled out, landing pages created, and any changes to websites.
Plus create marketing inspiration lists, “follow and learn” lists, and “competitor smarts” lists -- by yourself or with your entire marketing team.
Tracking competition and learning from them helps you have an edge over them. Making competitor tracking a part of your overall marketing strategy pays off in the long run, helps you get creative ideas without trying too hard, and allows you to find angles you might have missed.
On top of emails, monitor your competitors’ SMS and email flows
Don’t stop with just individual emails and ads. SMS and email flows or sequences should be monitored too as they’re pieces in a well-rounded omnichannel marketing strategy.
Check what emails they send in their welcome flow when someone subscribes to their newsletter. Take a look at how your competitor uses SMS to engage their audience.
These two data sets alone will give you a lot of insights and inspiration to consistently improve your own business.
Check their social and SEA ads and their related landing pages
Aside from SMS and email flows, don’t forget to see what social media and search engine ads your competitors have. This will help you improve your keywords and ad performance.
Check the corresponding landing pages for the ads your competitors are running and see how they structure these pages and what they use to persuade visitors to buy. Get an overview of their whole funnels, including with YouTube, Google Display, Pinterest, Meta and Tiktok Ads.
Familiarizing yourself with these will enhance your marketing efforts massively.
What to do with your competitor’s emails and ads
After saving the emails and ads you like and getting an overview of your competitor’s campaigns, you are free to do what you want with them. We recommend conducting a competitive analysis and using your competitor’s creatives as inspiration.
Through their ads and emails, you have the opportunity to de-risk your marketing strategy because you know what’s working for them and what appeals to your shared audience.
That’s not to say you should copy their creatives blindly. Be inspired and build on what they’ve done so you get a leg up on your competitors.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I sneak a peek at what my competitors are sending out in their emails?
You can sign up for their newsletters using a personal or generic email address if you want to spy on your competitor’s email campaigns.
If you don’t want to do that manually, you can use Panoramata, which has a huge library of emails from thousands of brands, all updated in real time so you’re always in the know about your competitor’s every move.
What are some easy ways to keep an eye on my competitor's ads?
Check out Panoramata if you want to scope out your competition's online ads and keywords.
Don't forget about social media –Panoramata can clue you in on your competition’s social ads and what's buzzing in their feeds.
