Competitive Analysis

The first step is deciding who gets compared. Alongside the providers your sales team knows, we add the competitors for visibility: portals, trade media and marketplaces that outrank you on your most important search terms without being rivals in the classic sense. Both groups compete for the same attention.

Then we gather from publicly accessible sources. That covers the websites themselves with their structure, range, argumentation and contact routes, organic search visibility, live ads through the Google Ads Transparency Center and Meta's ad library, reviews and how each company responds to them, social profiles, newsletters, technical traits such as shop system, payment methods and loading times, and job postings that show where money goes.

All of it goes into a matrix using identical criteria per provider, so the comparison does not collapse under mismatched yardsticks. The output is a set of named patterns: what everyone does the same way, what only one company does, and where nobody in the market gives a convincing answer. What stands out is often not the offer itself but the way it gets explained and backed up.

The most common trigger is a decision waiting to be made: a relaunch where structure and argumentation are being reworked, entering another market or country, a positioning that is not yet distinct in the market, or the question of whether an additional channel deserves budget.

It is also worth doing when inquiries drop without anything changing internally. The reason often sits outside the company: a competitor has invested, a marketplace has taken over a category, or a search result is now dominated by a portal. Shifts like that rarely get noticed from the inside, because they play out over months.

What a competitive analysis cannot replace is talking to customers. It shows how others present themselves, not why somebody buys. Those two questions need different methods. It should also never be set up as a search for confirmation. If the conclusion is fixed in advance, the result is an elaborate document with no insight in it. The value sits in the parts that are uncomfortable to read.

A lot of competitor numbers are estimates. Visibility indexes, traffic projections and ad spend figures from third party tools rest on models and samples rather than measured values. We use them for orders of magnitude and trends, not as precise figures, and the report marks which statements are documented and which are estimated. For a decision it is the direction that counts anyway, not the second decimal place.

An analysis is also a snapshot. Prices, ranges and ads change, so we record the cut-off date and agree which points should be watched on an ongoing basis. For pricing the rule is simple: we record what is publicly visible. Coordinating prices or terms with competitors is explicitly not part of this work, and competition law questions belong with your legal advisors.

The biggest risk lies in the conclusions. Copying everything that looks good produces an imitation of the market average. So we work with two separate lists: points where a gap has to be closed because they have become basic expectations, and points where you deliberately do things differently.