Competitor benchmarking for digital marketing – tools for different channels

Online competitor benchmarking is a structured analysis of the online services, capabilities and performance of an organisation within the areas of customer acquisition, conversion, retention and growth.

Quantitative benchmarking criteria give you hard figures you can compare your performance against that of competitors and seek to make improvements against. Examples include the popularity of your site and conversion rates to sale. Here you will be mainly accessing published data sources that you can compare your performance data from analytics against.

The Smart Insights RACE model provides a practical way of reviewing marketing effectiveness across the marketing funnel. Key measures to evaluate include:

• Reach – Website unique visitors, Viewable impressions on media sites
• Act – Key website outcomes for lead generation: Registrations and leads
• Convert – Sales – online or online-referred sales
• Engage – Customer satisfaction and ongoing engagement

See also competitor analysis.

The most popular tools for online competitor benchmarking of different digital channels

1. Social media

Rival IQ

Social Bakers – includes free insight

2. Web visitors and engagement

Similar Web – includes free tool

Comscore

3. Organic Search: backlinks and organic keyword rankings

e.g. SEMRush, AHREFs, Moz

Google Search Console provides insights on rankings for verified properties

4. Email marketing

Mailcharts – creative benchmarking – includes examples

5. Ads

Google Ads Auction Insights, AdThena andSpyFu

What Runs Where

Recommended Smart Insights resource

• Competitor benchmarking guide