How to Do a Competitor Analysis in 2022

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Do you want to stay ahead of your competition? Not sure who you are competing with and what their strategy is? Then it’s time to do an effective competitor analysis for your business!

Performing a competitor analysis is a must for any type of business that wants to stay informed about the situation on the market, but also improve their own strategy.

But not just that. By performing a competitor analysis, you can truly learn anything and everything about your competitors. From keywords they’re targeting, to ads they’re running – all within a few clicks. 

So in this guide, we’ll show you step-by-step how you can do an in-depth competitor analysis for your Shopify business so you can beat your competition and grow faster. Let’s dive in!

Whether you’re just starting a business or have been running it for a while, performing a competitor analysis should be an essential part of your marketing plan.

By performing a competitor analysis, you’re be able to: 

  • see how your company stacks up against the competition
  • identify market trends
  • highilight both yours and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
  • uncover potential opportunities in the market
  • make informed marketing and business decisions
  • discover why your product/brand is unique
  • get an idea of which competitor is more active on which channel
  • analyze competitors’ month over month growth
  • enhance your marketing plan and strategy
  • and so much more

All this information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring that both your product and marketing campaigns are outperforming industry benchmarks.

Getting started

Nowadays you can find plenty of tools like SimiralWeb or Semrush that can do a pretty good job of analyzing your competitors. But if truly want to understand each part of your competitors’ marketing strategy, we’d recommend checking out our Shopify app since it does give you a lot of useful insights. 

So in this post, we’re going to do a full competitor analysis for an imaginary sustainable shoe brand using our Competitor Analysis feature in the Lebesgue app

Ok, ready? Let’s get started.

Identify your competitors

Every competitor analysis starts with identifying your closest competitors. We all have businesses we’re competing with for customers and knowing who they are and what they’re doing will certainly help you improve your products and marketing strategy.

For our imaginary sustainable shoe brand, we’ll choose three main competitors: Allbirds, Saye, and 8000 Kicks. 

Note: If you’re perhaps not sure who your top competitors are, the Lebesgue App will give you recommendations that you can then choose to accept and analyze further.

Analyze the competitor landscape

After identifying our closest competitors, it’s time to get a high-level overview of the competitive landscape. 

To do that, we’ll take a look at the Competitor Landscape section in the Lebesgue app.

Notice how this section of the feature is divided into 4 main tabs:

  1. News and insights
  2. Market overview
  3. Brand awareness trend
  4. Trending keywords 

The “News and insights” section gives us a summary of the most important information contained in the remaining 3 tabs. So before we even start analyzing all the data and information from other tabs, we can take a look at some of the key insights.

In this case, it’s interesting to see that even though Allbirds is our largest competitor, it’s not necessarily the fastest-growing competitor. In fact, we can see that the fastest-growing competitor on a monthly and yearly basis is Saye. This tells us that Saye most likely has a strong presence on many marketing channels and that overall is investing a lot in marketing

competitor landscape in Lebesgue: Smarter marketing app

Now let’s switch to the “Market Overview” tab where we can compare our position in the market with our three competitors.

Market overview

competitor analysis feature, lebesgue app

Each circle on the graph represents one competitor. In this case – the largest, dark blue circle represents Allbirds, the light blue one is for Saye, the grey one is for 8000 Kicks, and the smallest blue circle is our imaginary  brand. 

Just by taking a quick look at this graph, you can immediately see which competitor is the fastest-growing or largest one, but more importantly, you can see how you compare to them. 

In this case, we can see that Allbirds is the largest competitor since there is a significantly higher number of Google searches for this brand than the remaining ones. Right after Allbirds is Saye which surprisingly has a higher growth rate, which tells us it is our fastest-growing competitor.

Here you can also change the time frame and analyze competitors’ growth on a monthly, quarterly and 6-month basis.

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is also an important factor that you want to analyze when doing a competitor analysis.

Looking at the chart below, you can see how the total number of searches for Allbirds grew in September 2021 and continue to grow until November 2021. This tells you that they’ve most likely started to advertise more in that period which then resulted in an organic boost in Google searches that than directly impacted their brand awareness.

brand awareness chart from the lebesgue:marketing consultant app

Trending keywords

If you already use Google Ads or you’re looking to start, you’ll absolutely love this next graph. 

Essentially, it shows you which keywords are currently trending, i.e. which keywords experience the highest number of searches.

So the x-axis shows us the number of searches in the last month, while the y-axis shows the growth of the keyword, compared to the month before.

Each blue circle on the graph represents one keyword, and in this case, we decided to look at keywords from only one competitor – Allbirds. 

trending keywords chart from the lebesgue:marketing consultant app

Here you can see that keywords like “all birdies”, “allbirds shoes”, and “allbird” all had +100k searches in the last month. And even though a lot of people searched for these keywords in the past month, when looking at the y-axis, we can see that there has been a negative change in the volume (growth) of these keywords.

In fact, the only keyword that grew by 50% in the last month compared to the previous one is the “birds all” keyword.

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Analyze your competitors’ live Facebook Ads

Another crucial part of performing a competitor analysis is analyzing your competitors’ paid ads.

Thanks to the Lebesgue app, this becomes super-easy since you’re able to analyze all of your competitors’ live Facebook and Google ads on a deeper level, and in one place.

Let’s start by analyzing Allbirds’ Facebook Ads.

allbirds facebook ads analysis

As you can see from the screenshot below, there are three categories we can use to analyze their ads.

allbirds facebook ads example

Analyze your Competitor’s creative and copy

The first one will show us all the new ads that Allbirds has launched in the last 2 weeks, while the remaining two categories will only show us the ad creative and ad copy.

Other than seeing their most recent ads, we can also see how many ads they have published over time. This will then tell us if there’s a certain period when Allbirds were publishing a higher number of ads.

For example, we can see one major spike that happened at the end of February, where they launched 44 ads.

In the “Visuals” category we can further see if they’re mainly running video or static ads. 

all birds facebook ads analysis

When it comes to video ads, there are mostly product-related video ads, with a couple of lifestyle videos, but what’s interesting to see is that every video has some form of text in it. 

As for static ads, the images are clean, product oriented and without any text or logos in them. 

allbirds facebook ads examples

Other than analyzing the ad creative, we can also deep dive into the ad copy. This breakdown makes it super easy for you to see which kind of copywriting strategy your competitors’ are going for with most of their ads. 

For example, you’re able to see whether they are using urgency more than mentioning shipping information, how often and what promotions they are running, etc. 

lebesgue competitor analysis feature screenshot

We were curious to see whether they’re highlighting any shipping information in their ad copy so we decided to explore the “Shipping info” category.

allbirds facebook ads examples

It was interesting to see that there are also quite a few ads that mention free shipping and free returns so this is certainly a tactic that it would be good to test out.

Analyze your competitors’ Google Ads

Ok, now that we know something about their Facebook ads, let’s see take a look at their Google Ads.

Before we start analyzing the data, let’s quickly explain what each column means:

  • avg. monthly searches –  expected number of searches for that keyword in any given month
  • used in Google Ads – whether or not you (the app user) are using this keyword in your own Google Ads account

  • organic placement – the position where the competitor appears for that keyword in organic results

  • competing brands – names of brands that show ads for that keyword (in the US)

  • keyword MoM growth – positive or negative change in growth for that keyword

all birds google ads analysis in the lebesgue app

Competitor’s keywords

If we take a look at Allbirds, we can see that the keyword “all birdies” is the first on the list, with the highest number of average monthly searches. 

Birdies is actually a close competitor of Allbirds, but it’s interesting to see that they don’t appear in the first organic result in Google Search for that specific keyword. 

Oh, and did we mention that you can see actual Google Ads examples from your competitors, for each of those keywords? Amazing, right?

Here you can really analyze different ad copy variations and see what each competitor chooses to highlight in their ads.

For example, on the screenshot below you can see two ads that appear for the same “all birdies” keyword, but from two different brands – Birdies and Allbirds. 

We love this part of the feature since it can also be a great source of inspiration for when you’re writing or looking to improve your Google Ads copy

allbirds google ads analysis
allbirds google ads example

If you’re just starting out with Google Ads, we wouldn’t recommend bidding on high-volume keywords like this one since there’s huge competition for it and you’re going to need a larger budget to compete with these brands. 

Instead, play around with the Keyword Planner tool and try building a list with relevant but not-so-common keywords that will help get your campaign off to a running start.

Your Turn

Now that you know how to do a full competitor analysis, it’s time to find those competitors, uncover their marketing secrets, and surpass their strategy.

If you’re running a Shopify business and would like to try our Competitor Analysis feature, you can do so for free within the 14-free trial. 

For more blog posts on digital marketing, be sure to check out our Lebesgue blog which is packed with insights and the latest industry trends.

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