When I joined Wordfence, our blog wasn’t working. Traffic was mediocre. Backlinks were scarce. We were publishing content, but it wasn’t earning attention.
I did what any marketer should do: I looked at what our competitors were doing differently.
Sucuri was our biggest competitor in WordPress security. When I analyzed their content, one thing jumped out immediately. They were generating a steady stream of high-quality backlinks. Not through link building schemes or guest post campaigns. Through scary news.
They had security analysts digging into new attack vectors and vulnerabilities. Their research was original, useful, and alarming enough that journalists and bloggers couldn’t ignore it. Every time they published findings on a new threat, links followed. News sites, tech blogs, security-focused publications. The backlinks weren’t the goal. They were the byproduct of content worth linking to.
We didn’t have that. We had developers writing about security best practices. Useful, sure. But not newsworthy.
So we changed our approach. We hired dedicated security analysts. We freed up developer time for research and investigation. We started hunting for threats ourselves, doing the forensic work to trace attacks back to their sources and document what we found.
It worked. Over several years, Wordfence became a credible news source for WordPress security. We published hundreds of threat analyses, vulnerability disclosures, and attack investigations. When we uncovered a supply chain attack where criminals were purchasing WordPress plugins and injecting backdoors, that story got picked up by Bleeping Computer, Dark Reading, and dozens of other outlets. When we traced a 4.5-year spam campaign across nine compromised plugins, same thing. The backlinks came because we had something worth linking to.
That’s one example. Competitor research won’t always reveal something that dramatic. But it consistently surfaces opportunities you wouldn’t find otherwise. A channel you hadn’t considered. A content angle that’s working for someone else. A gap where nobody’s showing up yet.
The point isn’t to copy what competitors do. It’s to use their visible activity as a source of ideas for what you might test next.
Why this matters for resource-constrained founders
You can’t test everything. Even well-funded marketing teams have to prioritize. For founders running lean, the constraint is sharper. You might have budget for one or two channel experiments per quarter. Pick wrong and you’ve burned months.
This is where competitor research earns its keep. Your competitors are running experiments for you. They’re testing channels, refining messaging, figuring out what works. Some of them have been at it for years. That’s data you can use.
When three competitors consistently invest in a channel, that’s signal. It doesn’t mean the channel will work for you. But it means the channel works for someone in your space. That’s worth knowing before you decide where to place your bets.
The goal isn’t copying. As HubSpot puts it, competitive analysis “is an opportunity to learn from others. It isn’t copying successful competitors to a T.” The goal is discovery. Expanding your list of options. Finding the channels and angles you hadn’t considered because you were too close to your own assumptions.
Sometimes you’ll find a crowded channel and decide to stay away. Sometimes you’ll spot a gap where competitors aren’t showing up. Both are useful outcomes. The worst outcome is making channel decisions in a vacuum, guessing at what might work when the evidence is sitting there waiting to be analyzed.
Competitor research doesn’t replace experimentation. You still have to test. But it makes your experiments smarter. You’re not throwing darts blindfolded. You’re starting with a shorter list of higher-probability targets.
The tools by channel type
The research method depends on what you’re trying to learn. Paid channels, organic content, and community-based marketing all leave different footprints. Here’s how to read each one.
Paid channels
For paid search and display, SpyFu and SEMrush are the workhorses. Enter a competitor’s domain and you’ll see estimated ad spend, the keywords they’re bidding on, and how long they’ve been running specific campaigns. SEMrush’s Advertising Research tool shows traffic estimates and cost data. SpyFu lets you dig into historical campaigns, including ads they tested and abandoned.
To give you a sense of the granularity available: SEMrush’s AdClarity tool can estimate that a company spent $111,900 over three months for 30.2 million ad impressions, breaking down weekly spend, ad placement preferences, and whether they’re buying programmatically or direct. That level of detail lets you gauge not just where competitors advertise but how aggressively.
The Meta Ad Library is free and underrated. Search for a competitor’s page, and you’ll see every ad they’re currently running across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. You can filter by platform, see when each ad started, and spot how many variations they’re testing.
What matters most isn’t just where they’re advertising. It’s consistency and duration. An ad that’s been running for three months is likely performing. A company testing dozens of variations is actively optimizing. A competitor who ran YouTube ads for two months and stopped probably didn’t find traction there. All of this is visible if you look.
If you’re researching EU-targeted competitors, Meta’s transparency rules give you even more. You can see demographic breakdowns, reach estimates, and geographic targeting. It’s remarkably detailed for a free tool.
Organic and content
Ahrefs and SEMrush both offer competitive analysis for organic search. The most useful feature is the content gap report. Enter your domain and a few competitors, and the tool shows you keywords they rank for that you don’t. Ahrefs describes this as “one of the quickest ways to find hundreds of great keywords that your website should be ranking for.”
Look for patterns. What content clusters are working for them? Which pages earn backlinks versus which ones just exist? A competitor might publish fifty blog posts a year but get 80% of their organic traffic from five pages. Knowing which five matters.
Similarweb shows traffic sources at the domain level. You can see how much of a competitor’s traffic comes from organic search versus paid versus referral versus social. If a competitor in your space gets 40% of their traffic from referrals and you’re getting 4%, that’s a signal worth investigating. Who’s linking to them? What did they do to earn it?
One benchmark worth noting: SEMrush research found that SaaS companies allocate their ad spend very differently than other industries, pushing 70% toward desktop and only 20% toward mobile. Knowing how your industry typically behaves helps you spot when a competitor is doing something unusual.
Community and partnership channels
This is where tools help less and manual research matters more.
Start with podcast appearances. Search your competitor’s founder name on Listen Notes or Spotify. If they’ve been on twenty podcasts in the last year, that’s a channel they’ve committed to. Note which shows, what topics, how the episodes performed. If you see them on industry-specific shows with engaged audiences, that’s a warmer lead than a generic business podcast.
Look for conference talks, webinar appearances, newsletter sponsorships, and integration partnerships. Check their company LinkedIn for announcements. Search their brand name on YouTube. None of this is hidden, but none of it shows up in SEMrush either.
Referral traffic data in Similarweb can point you toward partnership channels. You can see the top websites sending traffic to any competitor and identify where there might be a relationship worth understanding. Maybe it’s a guest post, an integration listing, or a co-marketing arrangement. Reverse-engineer what they did.
Interpreting what you find
Data without judgment is just noise. The goal isn’t to catalog everything competitors do. It’s to figure out what their activity tells you about where opportunity might exist.
Longevity is the most reliable signal. An ad running for three months is working. A podcast appearance strategy that’s been consistent for a year is generating value. A content cluster that keeps getting updated and expanded is driving results. Competitors don’t keep investing in things that fail.
The inverse is also useful. If a competitor ran LinkedIn ads for a quarter and stopped, that’s information. If they started a YouTube channel, posted eight videos, and went quiet, they probably didn’t find what they were looking for. You can learn from their abandoned experiments without paying the tuition yourself.
When multiple competitors show up in the same channel, pay attention. It doesn’t guarantee the channel will work for you. But it suggests the channel works for your market. Three competitors all investing in webinars is a stronger signal than one competitor trying it. The more validation you see, the more confidence you can have that the channel is worth testing.
Absence is harder to read. If no competitors are active on TikTok, it might mean the channel doesn’t work for your audience. Or it might mean nobody’s tried it yet. You can’t tell from the outside. But you can note it as a potential gap and decide whether the opportunity is worth exploring.
The most valuable finds often aren’t channels at all. They’re angles. A competitor’s most-linked content might reveal a topic your market cares about more than you realized. Their ad copy might surface a pain point you’ve underemphasized. Their podcast appearances might suggest an audience segment you’ve been ignoring.
Don’t just ask “where are they marketing?” Ask “why did they choose this, and does that reasoning apply to me?”
The “so what” framework
Analysis without a decision is just procrastination with better optics.
You’re not building a competitor encyclopedia. You’re trying to answer a simple question: what should I test next? Everything else is in service of that.
Once you’ve done the research, filter your findings through three questions.
Does this channel fit my strengths? A competitor crushing it on YouTube doesn’t mean you should start a YouTube channel. It means YouTube works for someone in your market. If you’re a strong writer but uncomfortable on camera, their YouTube success might actually point you toward an underserved written content opportunity in the same topic space. Channels reward different skills. Pick ones where you have an edge, or at least aren’t fighting uphill.
Is there room, or is it saturated? If four competitors are all bidding on the same keywords and running similar ads, you’re walking into a war of attrition. That might be fine if you have budget to compete. It’s probably not fine if you’re bootstrapped. Look for channels where competitors are present but not dominant, or where you’ve spotted a gap nobody’s filling yet.
Can I actually execute this? Be honest about your resources. A podcast tour sounds great until you realize it requires pitching, scheduling, preparing, and following up across dozens of shows. A content strategy built on original research sounds compelling until you calculate the hours. The best channel for your business is one you’ll actually commit to for long enough to learn whether it works.
From your research, you should be able to identify two or three channels worth testing. Not five. Not ten. Two or three that passed all the filters.
Then pick one to start.
One channel, executed consistently for 90 days, will teach you more than three channels done halfway. You can always expand later. Right now, you need to learn what works for your business, not what works in theory.
The honest trade-off
I’m not going to pretend this is quick.
A proper competitor analysis takes real time. You’re learning tools, pulling data, cross-referencing sources, making judgment calls about what the patterns mean. Even if you’ve done it before, a thorough review of three or four competitors across multiple channel types is a full day of work. Maybe two.
The tools have costs. SEMrush and Ahrefs aren’t cheap. You can get some mileage from free tiers and trials, but the good stuff is paywalled. If you’re early stage and watching every dollar, that’s a real consideration. The Meta Ad Library and manual research are free, but they’re also slower.
There’s also a trap worth naming: analysis paralysis. Competitor research can feel productive in a way that’s dangerous. You’re learning things. You’re filling spreadsheets. You’re avoiding the discomfort of actually picking a channel and committing to it. At some point, the research is done and you’re just hiding.
The point of this exercise isn’t to build a surveillance operation. It’s to find one or two channels worth testing. Once you have candidates that pass your filters, stop researching and start executing. You can always revisit the analysis in six months.
And competitor research isn’t the only way to generate channel ideas. It’s one input among several.
Look at analogs. Companies that sell to a similar customer but aren’t direct competitors. If you sell mattresses, look at what fitness equipment brands or home office furniture companies are doing. Same buyer psychology, different product. Their channel strategies might reveal opportunities that never show up when you’re only looking at other mattress companies.
Brainstorm from first principles. Where does your target customer already spend attention? What do they read, watch, listen to? What communities do they belong to? You don’t need a tool to answer these questions. You need to think clearly about who you’re trying to reach.
Better yet, ask them. Customer research is underrated for channel discovery. Five conversations with target customers about their media habits will surface ideas that no competitive analysis tool can find. Where do they go when they’re trying to solve the problem you address? Who do they trust? What podcasts are in their rotation? What newsletters do they actually open? First-party insight beats third-party inference.
Competitor research is one of the highest-leverage activities a resource-constrained founder can do. Just don’t mistake it for the whole picture.
Sources and Further Reading
What Is a Competitive Analysis — and How Do You Conduct One? HubSpot Comprehensive framework for competitive analysis including benchmarking methodology and the important distinction between learning from competitors versus copying them.
How to Do a Content Gap Analysis Ahrefs Step-by-step guide to finding keywords competitors rank for that you don’t, with template and filtering strategies.
Competitor Ad Spend: How to Uncover Your Rival’s Budget SEMrush Detailed walkthrough of using AdClarity and Advertising Research to estimate competitor paid media investment.
Marketing Channels Similarweb Documentation on analyzing traffic source distribution and identifying shifts in competitor channel investment over time.
Facebook Ads Library: The Definitive Guide Foreplay Practical guide to using Meta’s free ad transparency tool for competitor research, including EU-specific data access.
7 Ways to Use the Meta Ad Library to Inform Your Marketing Buffer Tactical advice on interpreting ad longevity, testing behavior, and competitive positioning from Meta Ad Library data.
Advertising Trends: Using Competitor Ad Spending Data for Benchmarking SEMrush Research study on ad spend patterns by industry, including the finding that SaaS companies allocate 70% of spend to desktop versus 20% to mobile.