Crush Your Competition: Here’s How You Can Conduct Thorough Competitive Analysis

Upthrust

“What enables the wise commander to strike and conquer and achieve things far beyond the reach of ordinary men is foreknowledge.”
– Sun Tzu

Walt Disney once said, “I have been against tough competition almost all my life. I would not know how to get along with it.”

Hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses are selling near-identical products or services in the same category as you with a competitive marketing strategy. While each one of you may have your own Unique Selling Proposition (USP), the chances are that you’re trying to target the same set of people like everyone else.

“How did they manage to raise $20 million in funding?”

“How are they attracting over a million people towards their website?”

“What’s so special about their ad campaigns?”

If one of your competitors are successfully hitting their KPIs and generating millions of dollars in revenue, the chances are that your mind is flooded with similar questions.

Don’t worry – it’s basic human nature.

As humans, we want to achieve the best possible results – and if we witness our competitors gaining the upper hand – we push ourselves.

Jack Levin quoted, “I think healthy competition is good for business. Just think about what Android would have been if it wasn’t for iPhone – a better blackberry?”

In short, we can conclude that competition is healthy.

But, if you want to get ahead of the pack and thrive, you need to do way more than manually exploring their website and social media profiles.

Doing this will take you nowhere.

Maybe – one of your competitors have a brilliantly crafted, conversion-focused Facebook Ad campaign up and running. Or what if a huge chunk of their website traffic is coming through referrals?

One of the most enticing ways to crush your competition is gaining insights into what’s working for them and what’s not.

I like to call it the “Spy & Steal Approach.”

In this blog post, we’ll be learning how you can crush your competition by looking at:

How to Find the Facebook & LinkedIn Ads Your Competitors are Running?
How Can You Use Your Competitors’ Website URL to Gain Valuable Insights into Their Marketing Set-Up?

So – let’s not wait anymore.

I can’t wait to share such valuable insights with you.

Let’s touch down on each of these questions one by one.

(👉 Do you want to watch the video version of this blog post? You can watch it on YouTube via this link. Otherwise, enjoy reading!)

How to Find the Facebook & LinkedIn Ads Your
Competitors are Running?

Quote by Steve Jobs - Good artists copy, great artists steal

Your competitors may be attracting gazillions of prospects towards their website via brilliantly crafted Facebook or LinkedIn ads.

And if they are running Facebook ads, they may be attracting their target audience on Instagram – because duhh – Facebook owns Instagram.

Imagine being able to dive deep into their Facebook and LinkedIn Ad campaigns.

Yes – it’s possible.

And doing this will not allow you to understand how many ads they have up and running but also look at the types of ads that work well with your target audience.

Let’s begin with Facebook.

How to Find the Facebook Ads Your Competitors are Running?

Step I: Hop onto Google and type in the keyword “facebook ad library.” The Facebook Ad Library will mostly appear at the top – but if it doesn’t – just click HERE.

Step II: Select your country. Select “All Ads” and type in your competitors’ company name. For this example, let’s look up “Live Light.”

Step III: And BOOM! Now you can see all the Facebook ads they have up and running. As simple as that! And that’s not all – you can gain valuable insights into these advertisements – as you will be provided with a world full of information by Facebook.

Review their highest-performing ads. From the advertisements’ copy to pictures to campaign type, try understanding what’s working for them and what’s not. Maybe, they are testing different variations – or what if one of their ads has helped them attract millions of their prospects towards their website?

My advice would be to evaluate their strategy month-over-month. This will help you understand how their ads are changing or whether they are canceling certain ads or trying some new things to level up their advertising game.

Also, you can click on these ads’ CTA to understand which pages these ads are redirecting you to. Most of the time, you’ll find it to be their website landing page – but that’s not always the case.

Maybe, they want you to download their latest eBook. In that case, the ads may redirect you to the dedicated eBook landing page. It’s completely dependent on what their goals are and what they’re trying to achieve.

Let’s click through one of their ads.

Upon doing so, this advertisement redirected me to their landing page.

Now – you can look at their URL to understand what they’re trying to achieve. This right here is an awareness campaign – which means they’re trying to fuel their top-of-the-funnel.

Further investigating the URL, they are trying to attract people based in Benelux.

Also, they’re trying to attract a lookalike audience.

Level0 signifies that it’s a new audience. The URL of the page that the ads will redirect you to can provide you with a world full of insights that you can use to understand more about their campaigns, structure, and their target audience.

Now – if you’re trying to attract a B2B audience, the chances are that they hang out on LinkedIn, which means it makes sense to run well-crafted LinkedIn ad campaigns.

And the best part is that just like Facebook, we can gain valuable insights into your competitors’ ad campaigns on LinkedIn.

Let’s learn how.

How to Find the LinkedIn Ads Your Competitors are Running?

Step I: Hop onto LinkedIn or just click HERE.

Step II: Type in your competitor’s company name.

nicholas from growforce doing a linkedin search

Step III: Upon hopping onto your competitors’ company page on LinkedIn, select “Posts.”

Step IV: Click on the “Ads” section.

Step V: And again, BOOM – you can have a glance at all the different ads your competitor has up and running at the moment.

They may be testing different variations like running the same ads with different CTAs in place or different languages.

The possibilities are endless.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn allow business owners to gain deeper insights into their competitors’ ad campaigns.

You have all the data right in front of you. I’d advise you to thoroughly review their ad campaigns and try to understand what’s working for them and what’s not.

You can literally save thousands of advertising dollars by conducting a thorough competitive analysis and saving yourself from the ad strategies that are destined to fail.

Also, Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t the only platforms that allow you to conduct a thorough competitive analysis. You can unlock a world full of information like your competitor’s website global rank, country rank, monthly traffic, traffic sources, and much more with this one platform that I am about to reveal in the next section.

Let’s have a look.

How Can You Use Your Competitors’ Website URL You Gain Insights into Their Marketing Set-Up?

In my opinion, SimilarWeb is one of the most brilliant competitive analysis tools that will present a world full of information right in front of you – from global rank to monthly visits to traffic sources and much more.

We use SimilarWeb all the time. Let’s look at how you can use this platform to gain valuable competitor insights.

Step I: Hop onto SimilarWeb.

Step II: Type in your competitor’s URL. As you type, their name or URL will appear in the drop-down menu.

Step III: And here you go. You can look at their Global Rank, country rank, and category rank.

Overview:

Also, you can have a glance at how their traffic has grown in the last few months. At the same time, you can access information like total visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, bounce rate, and much more.

Nicholas from growforce doing similarweb research

Trust me on this – this platform will provide you with mind-blowing information. You can even look at the traffic distribution by country:

Also, you can gain insights into their traffic sources. Here, you can see that most of their traffic is coming from search engines. Their second-biggest source is direct – which means they have an outstanding reputation. Also, over 19.56% of their traffic is coming from social – which means they have a decent social media following. They are not investing in Display, and their referral traffic isn’t that great.

Traffic Sources:

As you scroll down, you can access more information like their top 5 organic keywords and top 5 paid keywords.

Search Traffic:

Social Traffic:

Audience Interests:

Competitors & Similar Sites:

And more!

While you won’t have to pay anything for basic information, you can get a full comparison with SimilarWeb Pro. SimilarWeb will provide you with value-adding insights like: