Competitive Analysis: What to Include and What to Skip

A competitive analysis maps the landscape your business operates in: who you’re up against, how they position themselves, where they’re investing, and where the gaps are. Done well, it covers six core areas: competitor identification, positioning and messaging, product and pricing, marketing channels and spend, digital presence, and customer perception. Done poorly, it’s a slide deck full of logos and vague observations that nobody acts on.

The difference between the two isn’t effort. It’s knowing what you’re actually trying to answer before you start collecting data.

I’ve commissioned and reviewed competitive analyses across dozens of categories over the past two decades, from fast-moving consumer goods to B2B SaaS to financial services. The ones that drove actual decisions shared a common structure. The ones that sat in folders and were never referenced again shared a common flaw: they described the competitive landscape without interpreting it. This article breaks down what a rigorous competitive analysis actually contains, and why each component earns its place.

Who Should Be in Your Competitive Set?

Most competitive analyses start with the obvious names. The brands your sales team loses deals to. The companies your CEO mentions in board meetings. The names that appear when you type your category into Google. That’s a reasonable starting point, but it’s not a complete picture.

A properly constructed competitive set has three tiers. Direct competitors are the brands solving the same problem for the same audience at a similar price point. Indirect competitors solve the same problem differently, or solve a related problem that your customers might choose instead. Emerging competitors are the ones not yet on your radar but moving in your direction, often with a different business model or a tighter niche.

When I was running agency teams and we’d take on a new client brief, the first thing I’d push back on was their assumed competitive set. A travel brand would list the other travel brands. But their real competition for customer attention and budget was often something adjacent: a home improvement retailer, a consumer electronics brand, anything else competing for the same discretionary spend. Understanding that changed how we thought about messaging and media entirely.

For each competitor in your set, you need a basic profile: company size, funding status if relevant, geographic focus, target customer segment, and primary revenue model. This isn’t busywork. It contextualises everything else you’re about to analyse. A well-funded startup burning cash on growth plays by completely different rules than a profitable mid-market incumbent protecting margin.

If you want a broader framework for how competitive intelligence fits into market research more generally, the Market Research and Competitive Intel hub covers the full picture, from audience research through to ongoing monitoring programmes.

What Does Positioning and Messaging Analysis Actually Cover?

Positioning analysis is where most competitive analyses get lazy. Teams screenshot a few homepages, note that competitor A talks about “simplicity” and competitor B talks about “enterprise-grade security,” and call it done. That’s surface-level observation, not analysis.

What you’re actually trying to understand is the strategic logic behind the messaging. What customer problem is each competitor centring their brand around? Who are they explicitly speaking to, and who are they ignoring? What proof points do they rely on, and what are they conspicuously silent about?

The most useful output from this section isn’t a table of taglines. It’s a positioning map that shows where the white space is. If every competitor in your category is talking about speed and efficiency, and nobody is talking about reliability or support quality, that’s a signal worth acting on.

Look at messaging across multiple touchpoints: homepage, about page, pricing page, job postings, press releases, and any long-form content they publish. Job postings in particular are underused. They tell you what capabilities a company is building, which often predicts where their product and marketing is heading six to twelve months out.

Pay attention to tone as well as content. A brand’s tone is a positioning choice. If you’re analysing a category where everyone sounds formal and corporate, a competitor that writes like a human being has made a deliberate strategic decision. That’s worth noting.

How Do You Analyse Competitor Products and Pricing?

Product and pricing analysis has two distinct parts, and they need to be kept separate before being brought together.

On the product side, you’re mapping features, capabilities, integrations, and limitations. For physical products, that means specifications, variants, packaging, and any proprietary technology claims. For services, it means scope, delivery model, and what’s included versus what costs extra. The goal is to understand what each competitor actually delivers, not just what they claim to deliver. Customer reviews are often more reliable than product pages for this.

On the pricing side, you’re capturing price points, pricing models, and packaging structures. But pricing data without context is almost meaningless. A competitor charging 40% more than you isn’t necessarily winning on premium positioning. They might be losing deals because of it. A competitor charging less isn’t necessarily a threat. They might be serving a different segment with lower willingness to pay.

The useful question isn’t “what do they charge?” It’s “what does the market seem to believe justifies that price?” That’s where product and pricing analysis has to connect back to positioning and customer perception.

One thing I’d add from experience: always look at what competitors bundle together versus what they charge separately. Bundling decisions reveal a lot about where a company believes its core value lies, and where it’s trying to obscure a weakness.

What Marketing Channels and Tactics Should You Map?

This is the section where the analysis gets operationally useful, and where most teams underinvest in rigour. Knowing that a competitor “does social media and SEO” tells you nothing. Knowing that they’ve published 200 long-form articles targeting bottom-of-funnel commercial keywords in the past eighteen months, while spending heavily on branded paid search to protect their existing customer base, tells you something you can actually use.

Map each competitor across the following channels: organic search, paid search, paid social, organic social, email, content marketing, PR and earned media, partnerships and affiliates, and any offline channels relevant to the category. You won’t have perfect data on all of these, but you can build a reasonable picture from a combination of tools and observation.

For paid search specifically, the terms a competitor bids on tell you a great deal about where they’re trying to intercept demand. Are they bidding on your brand name? Are they targeting category terms or solution-aware terms? Are they running heavy retargeting? Each of these is a strategic signal, not just a tactical observation.

For content, look at volume, format, and topic focus. A competitor publishing high volumes of top-of-funnel educational content is playing a long-term brand and SEO game. A competitor focused almost entirely on case studies and comparison pages is closer to the bottom of the funnel and probably more focused on conversion than awareness. Neither is inherently right. Both tell you something about their priorities and their confidence in their product.

When I was at iProspect and we were scaling the agency, I’d look at competitor channel mix as a proxy for where they believed growth was coming from. If a competitor was pulling back on brand activity and doubling down on performance channels, that usually meant they were under margin pressure and chasing short-term numbers. That’s a vulnerability, not a strength.

What Does a Digital Presence Audit Include?

Digital presence analysis sits slightly differently from channel analysis. Channel analysis is about what competitors are doing. Digital presence analysis is about how well it’s working, or at least what the data suggests about that.

For organic search, you want to understand domain authority, keyword rankings, traffic estimates, and the structure of their content. Which pages are driving the most organic traffic? Which keywords are they ranking for that you’re not? Where are you outranking them, and on what terms? Tools like Moz can give you a reasonable read on domain-level authority, and the analysis of how Google’s ranking systems work is worth understanding if you’re making SEO-driven competitive decisions.

For social, look beyond follower counts. Engagement rates, content formats that perform, posting frequency, and the ratio of promotional to educational content all tell you more than raw audience size. A competitor with 50,000 followers and 0.1% engagement has a different problem than one with 10,000 followers and 4% engagement.

Website experience is also worth auditing, even if briefly. Page speed, navigation structure, the prominence of conversion elements, and the quality of the user experience from ad to landing page all affect competitive performance. If a competitor has a significantly better post-click experience than you do, that’s a conversion rate gap that no amount of media spend will fix on your side.

One thing teams often overlook: look at how competitors handle tracking and attribution in their URL structures. If you see UTM parameters consistently applied across their campaigns, that’s a signal of a relatively mature measurement setup. If you don’t, they may be flying partially blind on attribution, which is both a weakness and a reason to be cautious about reading too much into their reported results.

Why Does Customer Perception Analysis Matter?

This is the component most teams skip, and it’s the one most likely to surface something genuinely useful.

Everything else in a competitive analysis is, to some degree, the story a competitor tells about itself. Customer perception data is the story customers tell about them. Those two stories are often meaningfully different.

Sources for this include: review platforms (G2, Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Capterra, depending on category), Reddit threads and community forums, social media comments, app store reviews, and any customer-generated content you can find. You’re looking for patterns, not individual data points. What do customers consistently praise? What do they consistently complain about? What do they say they wish the product or service did differently?

The complaints are usually more valuable than the praise. A competitor’s five-star reviews will mostly confirm their positioning. Their one-star and two-star reviews will tell you where the product or service falls short of the promise, and that’s where your positioning opportunity often lives.

I’ve used this approach in category after category over the years. In one financial services brief, the dominant competitor had strong brand awareness and good review scores overall. But when you read the negative reviews carefully, there was a consistent pattern around customer service responsiveness during complex queries. The brand being reviewed wasn’t doing anything catastrophically wrong. They just had a gap between their “we’re here for you” positioning and the actual experience when things got complicated. That gap became the foundation of a challenger positioning for the client I was working with.

Social listening tools can help systematise this at scale, but a manual read of 50 to 100 reviews per competitor will often surface the same patterns faster than you’d expect. The goal is to find the consistent friction points, not to catalogue every complaint.

How Do You Structure the Output So It Gets Used?

A competitive analysis that doesn’t drive a decision is just a research project. The structure of the output matters as much as the quality of the research.

The most useful format I’ve found is a three-layer structure. The first layer is the raw intelligence: the data, observations, and evidence organised by competitor and component. This is the reference document. It’s detailed and it’s long.

The second layer is the synthesis: a summary of the key patterns across the competitive set, the areas of convergence (where everyone is doing the same thing), and the areas of divergence (where competitors are making different bets). This is where the insight lives.

The third layer is the so-what: the specific implications for your strategy. Which positioning territories are overcrowded? Where is there uncontested space? Which channels are competitors underinvesting in? Which customer needs are going unaddressed? This is the layer that drives decisions, and it’s the layer most competitive analyses never reach.

Keep the executive summary to one page. If you can’t articulate the three most important strategic implications of your competitive analysis in a page, you haven’t finished the analysis. You’ve just finished the data collection.

For more on how competitive analysis connects to broader market research practice, including how to set up ongoing monitoring rather than one-off projects, the Market Research and Competitive Intel hub is the right place to continue.

What Should You Leave Out?

Scope creep kills competitive analyses. The temptation is to include everything, because everything feels potentially relevant. The result is a document that takes three weeks to produce, runs to eighty slides, and gets referenced twice before being forgotten.

Leave out data you can’t interpret. If you have traffic estimates for a competitor’s website but no context for what those numbers mean relative to their business model or revenue, including them adds noise, not signal. Data without interpretation is just decoration.

Leave out competitors who aren’t genuinely relevant to your strategic decisions. If you’re a mid-market B2B software company, including the enterprise market leader in your competitive set because they’re the biggest name in the category is usually a distraction. They’re not competing for your customers. Analyse them briefly for context, but don’t let them dominate the work.

Leave out historical data that’s no longer actionable. A competitor’s marketing strategy from three years ago is interesting context. It’s not a basis for strategic decisions in the current market. Competitive analysis should be grounded in the present, with an eye on where things are heading, not a historical audit.

And leave out the vanity metrics. Competitor social follower counts, Alexa rankings, and similar surface-level numbers feel like data but rarely inform decisions. If a metric doesn’t connect to a strategic question you’re actually trying to answer, cut it.

The discipline of knowing what to exclude is what separates a competitive analysis that gets used from one that gets filed. It’s also, in my experience, the skill that takes longest to develop. Early in my career I’d include everything because leaving something out felt like missing something. Now I know that the omissions are often what make the analysis useful.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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