How to run a competitor audit in two weeks (and what to look for)
Most ecommerce brands don't run competitor audits. The few that do tend to run them once a year, in the wrong week, and end up with a deck that sits in Notion and never gets opened again.
The audit is most valuable when you have a specific decision to make. New product launch. Channel expansion. Pricing review. Repositioning. Tying it to a real decision changes everything about what you look at and what you do with the findings.
Here's the framework we use when we're brought in to do this for clients: five days of focused work, spread across about two weeks so the email and purchase journeys have time to land. What to look at, what to ignore, and how to turn it into action.
When to run one (and when not to)
Run a competitor audit when:
You're about to launch a product into a category you don't currently compete in
You're considering a price increase or a tier restructure
You're losing share or feel you are
A new entrant has appeared and gained attention
You're entering a new market (expanding into the United States or the European Union, and so on)
You're rebriefing creative or repositioning the brand
You've just lost a significant customer or deal
Don't run a competitor audit when:
Things are going well and there's no decision pending. It'll be interesting and useless
You're using it as a delaying tactic for a decision you should make today
You haven't yet got clear data on your own brand's performance
You're going to ignore the findings anyway
The audit is a tool, not a ritual. Tie it to a decision.
The plan: five days of work over two weeks
Five days of focused work, spread over about two weeks. One person, four to six hours per day on the working days. A two-person audit is faster but rarely twice as fast.
One caveat on the calendar. Two parts of this audit take real time to play out, not just working hours. A competitor's welcome flow and newsletter cadence unfold over days, and a real purchase, with its dispatch, delivery, and post-purchase emails, unfolds over a couple of weeks. So if you're not already signed up to their newsletter, and you haven't bought from them, start those two things on day one and let them run in the background. You may need to delay the audit, or spread the five days across a fortnight, so the email and unboxing evidence is in before you synthesise on day five.
Day 1: Pick the competitor set
Three to five competitors. Not ten. Ten is unfocused and produces a report nobody reads.
The set should include:
One direct competitor: same product category, same price point, same target customer. Their moves matter most.
One up-market competitor: a brand you'd grow into. Useful for understanding where the category goes.
One disruptor: a newer, smaller, faster-growing entrant. Often where the most interesting tactical moves come from.
Optional: one adjacent competitor. Different category, same customer (for example, for a skincare brand, an adjacent might be a wellness supplement brand targeting the same demographic).
Optional: one international peer. A brand in another market doing what you'd want to do in yours.
Sources for picking the set:
Direct customer feedback ("which brands did you consider?")
Search for your category head terms and see who appears
Founder networks (you usually know who's growing)
Industry awards lists and trade press (Drapers, Business of Fashion, Beauty Independent)
Day 2: Website inventory
What's on each competitor's website. Pure data collection.
For each competitor, capture:
Headline / hero positioning statement
Top three to five products + prices + key claims
Range breadth (number of stock keeping units [SKUs], categories, sub-categories)
Pricing structure (single tier, multiple tiers, subscription)
Trust signals (review counts, press features, certifications, awards)
Channels (direct-to-consumer [DTC] only? Wholesale? Amazon? Retailers?)
Any obvious differentiators (free returns, sustainability claims, ingredients, country of origin, founder story)
Capture everything in a structured table. One row per competitor, columns for each item above. Don't write narrative on Day 2. Just data.
Day 3: Marketing inventory
What each competitor's marketing looks like as a customer would actually see it. This is where most audits go shallow. Don't.
Homepage analysis:
Above-the-fold messaging
Primary call to action (CTA)
Social proof placement
Page structure (hero, features, products, social proof, footer; what's the rhythm?)
Email marketing: Sign up to every competitor's email list with a fresh address. Capture welcome flow, subject lines, send frequency. Watch what they do over a 30-day window.
The full purchase journey: Don't just look at the website. Buy something. Record your screen as you go, from the product page through the cart and checkout to the thank-you page, and note the cross-sells, the promotions, and the postage costs that show up along the way. Then order a real product from each main competitor, to your home address, and record the whole email journey: the browse and any abandoned-cart emails, the order confirmation, the dispatch and delivery emails, and the review request afterwards. When it arrives, video the unboxing and note everything in the box. The packaging, the inserts, the samples, the discount cards, the thank-you note, the returns slip. All of it. The unboxing and the inserts show you how much a competitor puts into retention and referral, and you can't see any of that from the website. It costs you the price of a product or two. Worth it.
Social presence:
Instagram / TikTok follower counts and recent post volume
Engagement rate on recent posts
Content style (user-generated content [UGC], lifestyle, product flat-lay, founder-led)
Community signals (comments, brand-to-customer interaction, branded hashtags)
Paid advertising:
Meta Ads Library: search the competitor's brand name. Note ad volume, creative style, ad copy patterns.
Google search: search head terms related to their category. Note who's bidding, what the ad copy says, what landing pages look like.
Programmatic / display: if you've got SimilarWeb access, capture display network presence.
Content:
Blog (if they have one): categories, post frequency, topic depth
Search engine optimisation (SEO): major keywords ranking via Ahrefs (Site Explorer, Organic Keywords)
Press and public relations (PR): recent mentions, awards, podcast features
Day 4: Performance signals
Where the audit becomes useful for prediction. Most audits stop at Day 3 (what they're doing). Day 4 asks: how well is it working?
Web traffic estimates:
Ahrefs (Site Explorer): domain rating, organic traffic, keyword count, paid traffic
SimilarWeb: total estimated traffic, channel breakdown
Note: traffic estimates are imperfect, treat as directional
Brand search volume:
Google Trends: searches for the competitor's brand name over the last 24 months
Rising or declining? Seasonality?
Backlink and PR signals:
Ahrefs: referring domains over time
Recent press mentions (Google "company name" + last 90 days filter)
Hiring activity:
LinkedIn job postings: heavy hiring in marketing and product is usually a growth signal. Hiring in operations is usually a scale-up signal. Hiring in finance and human resources (HR) is sometimes a fundraise signal.
Funding:
Crunchbase / PitchBook for any disclosed funding rounds. If there's a recent raise, expect aggressive marketing in the following 6–12 months.
App / tech stack:
Built With or Wappalyzer: captures what apps and tools are running on the competitor's site. Reveals strategic decisions (which Klaviyo competitor, which review platform, which subscription tool).
Day 5: Synthesis and action
Day 5 is where the audit either becomes valuable or becomes a folder nobody opens again.
Three questions to answer:
Where do they win? What's working that we don't have? Identify two to three specific things.
Where are they vulnerable? Specific gaps in their offer, messaging, or experience that we could exploit. Two to three things.
What action does this trigger? For the decision that started the audit, which way does the evidence point?
The deliverable is a one-page executive summary plus the underlying inventory tables (collected on Days 2–4). One page. If it goes longer, you haven't synthesised properly.
Recommended structure:
Decision context (one paragraph): why we ran this audit, what decision is pending
Headline finding (one sentence): the single most important takeaway
Three things they're doing better (bullets)
Three vulnerabilities we could exploit (bullets)
Recommended action (paragraph): given the findings, what we should do
The summary, not the inventory, is what gets read. The inventory backs up the summary if anyone wants to drill in.
What to look for (and what to ignore)
Some signals are louder than they're worth. Some are quieter than they should be.
Worth paying attention to:
Pricing changes (especially raises; they signal confidence)
Channel additions (TikTok Shop launch, Amazon expansion, retail partnership announcements)
Creative direction shifts (a brand suddenly running founder-on-camera content has decided positioning matters)
Subscription mechanic changes (offering 30% subscribe and save versus 10% is a meaningful margin decision)
Hiring senior people (head of growth, vice president [VP] of marketing, fractional chief marketing officer [CMO])
Backlink growth from publications you'd want to be in
Ignore the noise of:
Single viral posts (one-off, rarely repeatable)
Influencer activations (mostly paid, hard to evaluate honestly)
"Brand refresh" announcements (often vanity, often expensive)
Vanity metrics (follower count growth without engagement context)
Discount-heavy promotional periods (everyone runs Black Friday, learn nothing from comparing)
Common audit mistakes
Six things we see often.
Picking too many competitors. Ten is too many. Five is the cap.
Auditing without a decision in mind. Produces interesting reports nobody acts on.
Stopping at Day 2 (the website inventory). The real value is in Days 3–4.
Confusing "different" with "better". Just because they do something differently doesn't mean it works.
Not signing up to their email list. Email is the most revealing channel and the most overlooked in audits.
No synthesis on Day 5. A folder of screenshots isn't an audit.
How Sector 106 does it
Competitor audits are part of our Strategy & Operations service. We run them as paid one-off projects (one to two weeks of senior time, written report with one-page executive summary and underlying inventory tables) or as a phase within a longer engagement.
A few examples of audits we've delivered recently:
Homepage brand audit for Nailberry (April 2026). 14 findings including a 12-free vs 21-free claim discrepancy, unsubstantiated claims, and a London heritage vs "Made in France" contradiction. Not strictly a competitor audit but the same methodology applied to a brand's own positioning.
UK Nail Polish Ecommerce Trends 2026 + UK Nail Treatments Ecommerce Trends 2026 for Nailberry. Two market deep-dives covering market sizing, search volume, colour trends, consumer behaviour, brand landscape, and strategic recommendations. The brand landscape sections are competitor analysis at scale: 10+ brands compared across positioning, pricing, distribution, and visible marketing investment.
Klaviyo flows audit for Rainbird. Different in scope (auditing one tool deeply rather than competitors broadly) but same approach: surface inventory, performance signals, synthesis, action plan. 13 flows analysed, 7 specific recommendations, and A$8,000/month (Australian dollars) of unrealised revenue found.
The methodology is consistent. The output is a document we'd be proud to put our name on, not a folder of screenshots.
The honest test
Three questions:
Have you run a competitor audit in the last 12 months that produced a specific action you took?
Could you name your top three competitors and one specific thing each does better than you?
Could you name one vulnerability in each competitor's offer that you're not yet exploiting?
If no to any, an audit is the right next step.
Want a competitor audit for your brand?
We run paid competitor audits as part of our Strategy & Operations service. One to two weeks. Written report with one-page executive summary and underlying inventory tables. Senior people, 28 years in.
Or read more: Strategy & Operations →
