How to Do Competitive Analysis in Digital Marketing

When it’s done well, competitor analysis is a goldmine for your digital marketing strategy.

The reality is that competitors change in every realm you look in, which means you need to split your competitive research up to get a real idea of who’s competing with you and where.

You’ve got the content realm, where you want competitive content analysis, then you’ve got paid advertising, where you want competitive PPC analysis… You get the jist.

But today, we’re looking at how to analyze your competitors’ digital marketing efforts as a whole, and how to action those insights to optimize your own strategy.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is competitive analysis for digital marketing?

Digital marketing competitive analysis is an important part of your competitor research process, where you look into your competitors’ digital marketing efforts to see how they drive:

• Brand awareness
• Customer engagement
• Website traffic
• Online revenue

Why? So you can analyze the strengths and weaknesses to inspire your own strategy and discover new opportunities in your market. You might even uncover new competitors in the process; ones you hadn’t seen before in your other forms of competitor analysis.

Given the fact that the digital marketing landscape changes at a rapid – heck, constant – rate, this kind of competitive insight is something you want to keep an eye on. So, on to our next point: How d’ya do it?

How to run a digital marketing competitor analysis

Here’s the step-by-step process of how to do a competitive analysis for digital marketing:

1) Defining ‘competition’ in digital marketing

Before you make a list of your digital marketing competitors, you want to answer the question: What makes a business a digital marketing competitor?

There are different types of competitors for businesses like yours:

Direct competition: Businesses that have the same or similar products or services, with the same target market and audience.

Indirect competition: Businesses that sell the same product or service, however it may not be their main source of revenue or main focus of the business. They might sell other things too.

Replacement competition: Businesses that offer a product or service – whether similar or different to yours – that solves the same problem (eg. Netflix was a replacement competitor for Blockbuster, way back when)

Potential competition: Businesses that aren’t in the market yet, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a threat – always keep your eyes peeled for upcoming competition so you don’t get caught out.

Your digital marketing competitors might come out of the woodwork through any of the 8 types of digital marketing – or multiple types if they’re more of a direct competitor:

1. Affiliate marketing
2. Content marketing
3. Email marketing
4. Marketing analytics
5. Mobile marketing
6. Pay-per-click or paid marketing
7. Search engine optimization
8. Social media marketing

2) Identify your competitors

Yikes, competition really can come at you from all angles nowadays, can’t it? But the long list you create using the above specifications can be quickly refined with the right data.

Similar to your ideal customer profiling, you can create a points system on just how much of a competitor they are. This will help you work out who you need to focus on, and who not to compete with.

Be realistic in who you can compete against as a company and pick your battles wisely. And remember: too much of a competitor is just as much a waste of your time and resources as too little of a competitor.

On top of considering factors that are public knowledge like budgets, size of teams, and current brand awareness, you can quickly get clued-up on who is a worthwhile contender with in-depth digital analysis.

You can get this juicy behind-the-scenes type of information with competitive intelligence tools like Similarweb:

Let’s pretend we’re Nike. With Similarweb’s website analysis tool, you can get your hands on a full list of both organic and paid competitors that is judged by:

• A search overlap score
• Shared keywords
• Organic traffic
• Total traffic
• Industry

The tool also has a ‘Rising Competitors’ and ‘New Competitors’ filter so you can always stay one step ahead.

If another brand is on your radar and you’d like to understand just how much of a threat they are to your business, website analysis tools can give you the data and insights you need. You can quickly validate whether the site gets traffic, whether it gets the traffic you want, whether you share the same core keywords, and more.

3) Consider the 4 Ps of marketing

Now it’s time to assess the 4 Ps of marketing. If you don’t know what they are, the 4 Ps of marketing are:

• Product (eg. function, packaging, services, and problem it’s solving)
• Price (eg. cost, discounts, price margin)
• Promotion (eg. advertising, marketing, publicity)
• Place: (eg. distribution, logistics, channel)

These are four considerations to look into if you want to successfully market your product or service. In doing so, you can work out your competitors’ USPs, but you can also develop your own niche as a business, helping you to stand out in a very competitive and very crowded market.

4) Analyze your marketing competitors’ target audience

Looking into your competitors’ target audience is the next step in your digital marketing competitor analysis.

This will help with three things:

1. Refining your list of true competitors further
2. Identifying new areas of opportunity for your business
3. Optimizing your digital marketing strategy and your marketing plan

The best way to understand who your competitors are targeting is to look into their website in great detail. Check out their About Us page, their blog, any downloadable assets or whitepapers, as well as their social media, webinar content and customer reviews.

Ask yourself why the 4 Ps you’ve spotted for each business work for this specific target audience; what appeals to them about this product the most?

Using Similarweb’s website analysis tool, you can evaluate any website’s target audience – where they’re based, their age range, their other interests, and the overlap of your own target audience.

5) Choose your competitive analysis framework

Before you make any more big moves, you want to choose your competitive analysis framework. There are a bunch of frameworks for you to choose from, but SWOT analysis is one of the most well-known.

“What’s SWOT?”, we hear you say. SWOT stands for:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

While strengths and weaknesses are two things that a company can control and change with the right data and resources, opportunities and threats are more external, taking into account the competitive landscape companies operate in.

Whichever framework you choose, having one will help you in a number of ways. The benefits of having an efficient competitive analysis framework in place, include:

Identify any shifts in the market

Locate gaps in your strategy

Target (and steal from) effective marketing strategies

Avoid – sometimes costly – mistakes that others have made

Create both realistic and measurable goals

Make your data more digestible and readable

Sounds good, right? Choose which of the top 7 competitive analysis frameworks is best for your business.

6) Analyze your competitors’ marketing activities

Once you’ve chosen your framework, that’s when the fun really begins. It’s time to take a deep dive into your competitor’s digital marketing. Get your goggles at the ready.

We’ve already talked about the different aspects of digital marketing, but here’s where you ask yourself questions like:

• What platforms are they using to reach their audience?
• How do they split their time and resources?
• Where does their focus appear to be?
• What are they marketing spends?

A good marketing intelligence tool is really the only way you can access this kind of data. For example, you can get a full overview of your competitors’ marketing channels with Similarweb, showing the traffic they get and which platforms the traffic is coming from.

Above, we have the overview of Nike.com’s website traffic and marketing channels, via percentages and absolute numbers. We can see that most of its traffic comes direct and through organic search, which means Nike’s brand awareness is on point. (Who knew?).

In fact, we can actually see that the traffic acquired through each of their marketing channels remains quite consistent, other than a small drop in referral traffic in July 2023.

Given Nike’s strong efforts in brand awareness, it’s not a surprise that its top organic keywords are branded keywords like “nike”, “nikes”, “nike shoes”, “nike air force 1”, and so on. But what about the non-branded organic keywords? Which are the keywords that Nike are profiting on versus their competitors?

Using our fresh keyword data within our Search tool, you can stay up-to-date with your competitors main keywords – branded or not. You can see the top URL that these search terms lead users to, as well as the SERP features that might have attracted them in the first place.

7) Analyze your online competitors’ traffic acquisition strategy

Looking into the organic keywords that lead users to your competitor’s site is just one part of this step. Understanding and analyzing our competitors’ traffic acquisition strategy takes the knowledge you get from looking into their marketing channels, and dive even deeper.

The aim? To uncover your competitors’ target keywords for organic and paid search, target markets, key focus on topics or themes, and their competitive game – not to mention any search trends or trending keywords they’re hopping on. All so you can take the ideas that’s relevant to you, then do it 10 times better.

To get there, you want the data to reveal what your competitors are up to with their digital marketing strategy, so you can see their strengths and their weaknesses.

Peeking at your competitors’ PPC efforts is a quick-win if you want to find out what they want to win more traffic for, or where they’re feeling their most competitive or competed against. Using Similarweb, you can find out competitors’ paid keywords, how much they’re paying for them, and the ads and landing pages that accompany them.

Here, you can see Nike.com’s paid website analysis with all the information you’d need (or like to have) as a PPC marketer or marketing generalist. 

We’ve touched on organic keywords, but when your data is this fresh, it’s worth talking about the opportunity within trending keywords on organic search.

This is the Worldwide view of Nike.com’s top organic pages over the past 12 months, giving you a good idea of the key markets they gain traffic from to see how your own strategy matches up.

But by refining your search to a specific geography, you can get more of a range of search terms, specific landing pages, and favorite sneaker choices for a country. Here’s the United States view as an example:

8) Analyze your competitors’ marketing campaigns and promotions

Now you have an idea of your competitors’ general digital marketing strategy and activities, you can hone in on the campaigns and promotions they do throughout the year.

It might be a yearly campaign like Black Friday or January sales, it might be an influencer partnership to build brand awareness, it might be a one-off marketing campaign. Whatever it is, you want to know about it and analyze its performance. You never know, it could inspire your own campaigns.

Following your competitors’ social media and email marketing is a great place to start. You’ll be able to see the messaging and the artwork around these campaigns. While tracking your competitors’ email engagement isn’t possible, you can keep an eye on social media engagement because it’s public.

If math isn’t your strongpoint, there are tools that will help you track your competitors’ number of followers, increase or decrease in followers, engagement rate, and so on. Some examples of social intelligence tools include Sprout Social and Meltwater.

Don’t forget to monitor comments and interactions with their customers. It’s more of a manual process, but it gives a good idea of the demographics they’re targeting and the responses they’re getting.

But where are the social media posts and the emails sending – or hoping to send – these customers to, and are the landing pages proving to be effective?

Here’s where more website analysis comes in. With campaigns and promotional offers comes a big push, and with a big push (if successful) comes a big surge in traffic. Say hello to a trending page… or a not-so-successful campaign.

Taking a look at the past month, we can tick the Trending Pages at the top to see the organic pages that have seen a rise in traffic recently.

No surprises that the fashionistas out there have been powering nike.com/launch – a page that’s updated frequently with Nike’s newest releases, but maintains the same URL. Nice idea for any ecommerce brands out there.

Another top trending page for Nike is the landing page promoting their sustainability campaign: Nike Refurbished.

On top of that, you can use paid website analysis tools to discover search ads that your competitors are running, or have been running within the past year. This gives you an idea of their focus areas and what tricks they’ve got up their sleeves, and help you prepare for seasonal trends and competitive campaigns in the future.

Our Search Tracker tool allows you to keep up to date with search as changes happen. It includes a Rank Tracker, which gives you daily updates of search rankings on organic search, and Brand Protection, which keeps you alerted to any competitive moves made on your business-critical keywords.

These notifications mean you can stay on top of your competitors’ digital marketing efforts and traffic acquisition, but also allow you to pivot quick to make sure yours is optimized and performing its best at all times.

What’s next?

Now it’s time to take all the insights from your digital marketing analysis report and actionthem.

Use the information about your competitors’ digital marketing strategies to inspire, strengthen and optimize your own.

You may have discovered:

• Keywords you were missing out on (but they’re winning on)
• The competitive edge of catching trending topics at the right time
• Influencers or partners you could benefit from working with
• New markets you could enter
• Paid ads where you’re throwing money down the drain
• Engaging subject line ideas for email marketing
• A more appealing tone of voice for your social media

All that will fuel and inform your strategy to make it better than ever. In other words: steal from their strengths, and take opportunity from their weaknesses.

Insights are great, but actionable insights? They’re the best if you really want to see your ROI skyrocket (which you probably do – just a hunch).

Competitive tracking made easy

With multiple competitors and multiple elements of digital marketing to keep track of, competitive analysis can get pretty overwhelming. Not forgetting all the other marketing tasks your job involves.

That’s where competitor tracking comes in handy. You know, so it can do all the hard work for you and point you (and your strategy) in the right direction.

With Similarweb, you can set up a competitive tracker in less than 5 minutes to get monthly highlights from your main competitors – whether they are paid, organic, display or social competitors. This comes through straight to your inbox, or you can have a nosey on the dashboard so you can dive deeper into these insights.

Competitor trackers like this will benefit you in a number of ways, including:

• Monitor digital traffic across your competitive landscape
• Regular insights into your rivals’ website performance and engagement data
• Benchmark your digital performance versus competitors in your industry
• Discover emerging trends in your competitive set so you can react fast
• (And with Similarweb, you get it straight to your email) 

Your competitors won’t know what hit ‘em

Much like your own digital marketing efforts, your competitors’ won’t have a day off. Every successful marketing strategy needs to develop as the business, target audience and search landscape develops – and that means frequent change.

Digital marketing competitive analysis is an ongoing process, so ensure you’re doing it regularly to never miss a beat with your competition and their competitive advances.

Tools like Similarweb make this easy for you. It saves you time, makes the data digestible and actionable, and it’s all in one place.

If you’d like to find out more, try Similarweb for free or get in touch with one of our experts today.

FAQs

What is a digital marketing competitive analysis?

A digital marketing competitive analysis is the process of researching, analyzing, and comparing the online marketing strategies and tactics of competitors in a specific niche or industry. This helps businesses identify gaps, opportunities, and trends to inform their own digital marketing strategies.

Why is digital marketing competitive analysis important?

Understanding what your competitors are doing online offers insights into what works and what doesn’t in your industry. It can also help identify new opportunities, potential threats, and areas for improvement in your own strategy.

Which digital platforms should I analyze?

Typically, you’d want to analyze platforms where your competitors are active and where your target audience hangs out. This might include websites, organic rankings, social media channels, email marketing, online advertising, content marketing, and more.

How often should I conduct a digital marketing competitive analysis?

The digital landscape changes frequently. Ideally, a competitive analysis should be conducted at least once a year, but quarterly assessments can be beneficial for rapidly changing industries.

What tools can I use for this analysis?

There are numerous tools available ranging from free to paid, including Similarweb, Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, Semrush, Social Blade, and Google Alerts, among others. The best tool often depends on the specific aspect of digital marketing you’re analyzing.

How do I select which competitors to analyze?

Start with direct competitors who offer similar products or services in the same market. Then, consider indirect competitors who might be targeting the same audience but with different offerings. It’s usually good practice to analyze a mix of both.

What makes Similarweb the best tool for competitor analysis? 

Similarweb provides marketers with a full toolkit for competitor research, offering the data and insights you need to spot your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to inspire and empower your own marketing strategy.