Are you planning to launch a new product?
Competitor analysis is the first step. This guide explains how to do a deep-dive analysis to find market gaps and opportunities, before investing time and money.
Around 30,000 new products are launched every year. 95% of these fail, according to Harvard professor Clayton Christensen.
Why? Because they don’t meet a real customer need. Analyzing competitors helps you understand the market, learn from their mistakes, and find their weaknesses, so your product doesn’t suffer from these statistics.
Key takeaways:
- Before launching a new product, use competitor analysis to find market gaps, understand real market needs, and avoid failure.
- Start by defining the customer’s problem, then analyze your rivals’ products, pricing, and marketing. Scrutinize 1- and 2-star reviews to pinpoint weaknesses you can solve.
- Create a detailed spreadsheet comparing features, pricing, share of voice, customer sentiment, SEO strategies, and more.
- AI tools like Revuze can automate this at scale, helping you build a clear comparison of features, pricing, and customer sentiment.
What is competitive product analysis?
A quick review for those who haven’t done this yet (skip to the next section if you have).
Competitive product analysis is the process of evaluating competitors’ products to find their strengths, weaknesses, and current market position. It lets you analyze the current demand for your product and helps you plan appropriate strategies to outperform competitors.
For example, you can identify current products in your niche and why they are/are not selling. With this information, you can devise your own USP and offer a price that other market players can’t match.
Create a basic value proposition canvas for competitor analysis by dividing customer behavior into three types: fears, wants, and needs. (Customers buy products for fear of what will happen if they don’t use it, for the luxury of having it or for the need to use it.) A similar canvas evaluates the product in three categories: benefits, features, and experience. (Customers prefer to purchase products after comparing features, understanding benefits, and evaluating the previous or current experience of the business selling the product.)
Undertaking a product competition analysis can help identify how your competitors’ products help your target audience overcome their fears and fulfill their needs, and how you can fit in that mix.
Competitive product analysis also involves analyzing competitors’ sales and marketing strategies. With this information, you can implement robust business strategies that outperform competitors.
Why is it important to know your competitors?
Knowing what else is in the market is a basic building block of your strategy. Here are some examples of why:
Minimize bottlenecks and optimize customer experience: When you identify the problems customers face, you can adjust your product features accordingly. This helps you get off the ground running with a product optimized for customer experience and accurately positioned.
Uncover market trends: Predictive data analysis and forecasting help you uncover future market trends so your product remains on the top-selling chart for years to come.
Analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses: Competitive analysis helps to identify rivals strengths and weaknesses. You understand what makes their product a success and which features need improvement. This allows you to capitalize on their areas of weakness.
Learn from mistakes: When launching a new product, analyzing your competitors could prevent you from repeating their blunders. Define the problem and find competitor products to analyze.
Returning to the astounding fact that 95% of new products fail, the question, of course, is, why?
Svafa Grönfeldt, faculty member for MIT Professional Education’s online program Designing High Impact Solutions with MIT designX explains:
“Many innovations fail because they introduce products or other solutions without a real need for them.” She posits that organizations don’t take customer needs into account when launching products. “Some of these failures arise from a lack of empathy on the part of the organization, with those in decision-making positions not taking the necessary time to study and understand customers’ true needs. Without putting themselves in their shoes, it’s often too late when they realize there’s no market for their solutions,” she affirms.
The first step: Define your target audience’s needs to understand your business opportunity:
How to do it:
Examine your competitors’ products and discover issues. Define the exact problem and identify the specific need.
Identify your top three closest competitors and answer the following questions:
- What are their current product offerings?
- How much do they charge? Do they offer a free trial?
- What is their current market share?
- How do they differentiate their products from their competitors?
- Why do people trust their product?
- How do they market their products?
- What are the features that are liked the most?
- What are the features that the product lacks that are in demand?
- How often do they add new features to their product?
Here are some ways to get answers to the above questions:
- Conduct an in-depth analysis of their website and note product details, including features, pricing, product documentation, and product videos. Gather as much information as possible.
- Watch videos uploaded by customers, bloggers, or influencers about the products. Often, people discuss the best features of the product or mention the problems they face while using the product.
- Pick social media followers of your competitors’ products and contact them. Send them a short survey to gather customer opinions.
- Take the help of sites like CNET, Google My Business, MouthShut, Capterra, TrustPilot, Yelp, and others to gather real customer feedback.
Now you’ve generated a list of problems in your competitors’ top products.
Find UX issues with competitors’ products
The next step is finding UX (User Experience) issues in the products you listed in the step above. This can help you learn from their mistakes and offer a better user experience. The improved customer experience will, in turn, have a positive impact on your product conversion rate.
How to find UX issues in competitor products:
- Buy the product or sign up for a free trial. Step into the shoes of your competitors’ customers to pinpoint UX issues that other customers might face.
- Observe their onboarding process. Does it involve too many steps and feel frustrating, or is it easy?
- Test the mobile-friendliness of the website. Does the site offer a good page experience?
- Measure the site’s speed, and check other factors that impact UX like HTTPS, bounce rate on product pages, product reviews, product ratings, product comments, etc.
- Determine the tone they use in their product’s messaging.
- Check features that might not be useful to your target audience. You can eliminate such features in your product and offer a better price point.
Analyze the UX of all top three competitors and note down any information you learn.
Find product listing issues with competitor products
A product listing is a catalog of all the products a company sells. Each product has an individual landing page with complete information about the item, like title, price, images, and description.
When analyzing your competitors’ product listing, look for answers to these questions:
- Have they listed their product under the correct category and sub-category? For example, if they sell t-shirts, they should be listed under the relevant category (i.e., t-shirt) and sub-category (e.g., polo, round neck, or v-neck).
- Is the information in the listing page complete? Have they copied the description provided by the manufacturer?
- Does the listing include screenshots? If yes, are they clear and easy to understand?
- How often do they update the product description?
- Is the pricing correct?
- Have they mentioned the amount of remaining stock?
- Upon which third-party sites have they registered? Did they miss a primary product listing website?
- Have they optimized their product listing to rank higher on relevant websites? If yes, which keywords have they used?
- Are there misspellings on the product page?
- Have they listed the price publicly on other relevant sites? If yes, is it the same as on their website?
Answering these questions will help you find common product listing issues, such as price mismatch, missing information, bad CTA, and copied product description.
Find product review issues with competitor products
Reading reviews of your competitors’ products can tell you a great deal about customer satisfaction, and point to opportunities.
Let’s say you sell portable speakers. If many competitors’ customers complain about sound distortion when connecting via Bluetooth, you would have a great opportunity if your product works perfectly in bluetooth mode.
Here are some ways to discover a competitor’s product review issues
- Check out the reviews posted on the competitors’ proprietary site. Read 1-star and 2-star reviews to uncover issues.
- Monitor comments on Google and on other third-party review sites.
- Check popular review sites, such as Yelp, Capterra, G2 Crowd, TrustPilot, or GetApp to find if customers have left feedback.
- Google your competitors product name + reviews.
- Use Google Alerts to stay informed when a customer mentions your competitors’ product or brand.
- Leverage social listening tools like Revuze to identify what competitors’ customers are saying.
Analyze both positive and negative reviews: positives for strength, negative for weaknesses. For example, a positive review for a coffee maker helps discover that it’s easy to wash and offers options to make different brews. Negative reviews indicate its very loud when brewing and not durable. Testimonials will give you a better idea of what loyal customers think or say about their product.
Analyzing reviews keeps you updated regarding issues in your competitors’ products, along with new features that they add. Use the insights gathered from your competitors’ customer reviews to enhance your product and provide a better experience.
Product competitive analysis for design
Color plays a huge role in branding. Begin by analyzing the colors your competitors are using to differentiate your products.
Here are some ways you can conduct a competitive analysis for product design.
- Evaluate the colors they use on their landing page. Is there a specific reason for choosing that color?
- Look at the location of the call-to-action buttons. Are they easy or difficult to find?
- Test the look and feel of the platform on different devices. Is there any difference in their product’s mobile design when compared to desktop?
- What are the product features and how do they function together?
- How well does the product perform as compared to similar products in the market?
- Analyze the tone and copy. How effective are they in converting customers?
- Are there industry-wide design flaws? In the 1990s, for example, every electronic gadget required a charge before first use. Tony Fadell, one of Apple iPod’s original product team members, saw this as an opportunity to upgrade customer experience. Apple was the first company to package gadgets fully-charged and ready to use out of the box.
What should your competitive market research include?
When conducting competitive market research, your analysis should include every piece of information that can help you improve your product and generate more sales.
Here is a starter guide: .
Company Overview: A summary of your competitors, their resources and customers. Review their website’s career section to identify who they are hiring or which teams are expanding. This information can alert you to upcoming plans.
Product features: Analyze product features to provide you with information to improve your product and develop uniqueness.
Pricing: How much do they charge? Is there a pricing model? Discover if there is a pricing mismatch with a segment of customers.
Perks: Do competitors’ offer an additional product or service with their product? Discount coupons? An app? Anything else?
Share of voice: Share of voice is the percentage of exposure a product gets on the web and social media, when compared to the entire product category. Tools like Revuze can help you measure the share of voice of your competitors’ products.
Sentiment Analysis: Measures how satisfied customers are with a particular product or brand. Measuring sentiment analysis can help you find the sentiment of customers who have used the product.
Geography: Upon which markets are your competitors’ focusing? This could help you find both established and emerging markets for your product.
Social media platforms: Which social networks do they use? What kind of posts do they publish and how frequently?
SEO: Are competitors engaging in SEO practices? If they are, then what are they focusing on most?
Blogging: Are they publishing blogs or articles on their website related to their product? Check blog topics and the engagement level of the audiences.
Influencers: Is your competitor using influencer marketing? What are their tactics? How are the responses of the audience?
Video marketing: Determine if competitors are creating videos or conducting webinars to promote their product. If they are, watch the videos to determine whether you can do something unique.
Paid Ads: Tools like Similar Web show if competitors are running ads, and the top keywords they target.
Customer acquisition process: Check competitors’ strategy: referral programs, loyalty clubs, affiliate strategy, or other unique ideas.
Sales: What is your competitors’ sales strategy? Analyze this by booking a demo, purchasing a product, etc. Do they provide free trials? How long do they take to respond to inquiries?
Net Promoter Score: NPS determines how likely a customer is to recommend the product. If a competitor’s NPS isn’t high, you have an opportunity. Find the NPS of your competitors’ products by conducting a survey.
How AI enhances competitive product analysis
Manually reading product reviews is slow, expensive, and limited in scope. It’s impossible for a human team to manually read and categorize millions of data points from reviews, social media, and forums.
AI-driven sentiment analysis automates this process at a massive scale. It sifts through this ocean of unstructured data in minutes, not months, to provide a clear, unbiased picture of the market. This speed and scale are critical for two reasons:
Detecting emerging trends: AI can identify new topics and shifts in customer-speak as they happen. It can spot a new trend (like “skinimalism” in beauty or a new feature request) in real-time, long before it appears in traditional market reports. This allows you to act on an opportunity before it becomes common knowledge.
Pinpointing competitor weaknesses: An AI-powered tool spots recurring negative sentiment tied to specific topics. While a manual review might find a few complaints, AI can confirm that 30% of your competitor’s 1-star reviews mention “flimsy packaging” or “confusing setup.” This turns an anecdote into a statistically significant, actionable weakness you can exploit.
How Do You Analyze Competition?
There are basically two ways to analyze your competition: Manually, or with a tool.
Manually
We’ve provided suggestions on how to enact a manual analysis throughout this document. While a great deal of information is publicly available and free, it is time consuming. As social media and online sources proliferate, it is almost impossible to manually assess all the data. Including only some of the data in your analysis may skew the result and provide you with information that is not reflected in the actual market.
Using a combination of tools
Tools are the easiest way to analyze your competition.
- Pi Datametrics
Pi Datametrics allows you to measure your competitors’ performance by analyzing market trends. Track audience intent and tweak your marketing message to persuade customers to try your product instead of your competitors’.
- SEMrush
SEMrush is an excellent tool to research your competitors’ marketing strategy. Enter your competitor’s website URL to check organic and paid traffic, sources, devices, location, and top pages.
You can also uncover your competitors’ top pages and their keywords. If your website is published, use SEMrush’s keyword gap feature to find phrases that your competitors use, but you don’t.
The advertising research feature of SEMrush helps identify the top paid ads of your competitors and the keywords for which they bid.
- BuzzSumo
Find your competitors’ top content using BuzzSumo. Enter their website URL in the search bar. Filter search results by publish date, content type, and shares across social platforms.
- Feedly
Feedly is a news aggregator site that can help you stay on top of competitors’ product releases, PR, or other updates. Add Feedly’s browser extension to monitor sites quickly.
- Prisync
Prisync helps you keep an eye on competitor prices. Maintaining awareness of your competitors’ pricing strategy allows you to adjust your pricing accordingly.
Using Revuze
We won’t pretend we’re not biased. Of course we are.
But that’s because we’ve created a tool for accurate competitive market research on your entire category, not simply on three competitors (although you can choose to view only three if you’d prefer).
Revuze aggregates information from social listening, online reviews, ecomm data, customer care data, forums, blogs and more – and also allows you to validate your findings with surveys from within the tool itself. Learn more about it here. It provides a 360 competitor analysis, pricing analysis, deep social listening, SWOT analysis, Product Return Analysis, complete access to and analysis of all competitor social presence, including influencers and UGC, and so much more. With Revuze, you don’t have to choose between VoC analysis and social listening, since it provides it all. If you’d like a free demo to see how it can serve you, just ask for one here.
How do you write competitive analysis?
Start your product competitive analysis document by creating an excel sheet organizing all the information you have about your competitors. This will be your go-to page when you need information about your competitors’ product.
Here is an example. List elements like
- Company name
- Product name
- UX issues
- Product listing issues
- Percentage of positive and negative reviews
- Product design issues
- Key features
- Missing features
- Price
- Perks
- Share of voice
- Sentiment Analysis
- Pros of the product
- Cons of the product
- SEO details
- Social media metrics
- Content marketing
- Sales and customer support
Access the template here and use it to gather competitive product analysis information.
Competitive product analysis example
Let’s conduct a demo to help you better understand competitive product analysis. I only compared the features of the products so that you can get started.
Headphones
Let’s say Sony (a Fortune 500 company) wants to launch a wireless headphone. Sony will analyze its competitors’ products. In this example, Sony examines “XXX Noise Canceling Headphones”.
Using these insights, Sony can build a wireless headphone that offers greater battery efficiency, doesn’t slip during workouts, has fast charging features, and is pocket-friendly.
Coffee Making Category
Let’s say, Nespresso wants to manufacture a new coffee making machine. Nespresso would first want to know what other options are available to the customers. Let’s consider Nespresso analyzes “ YYY Coffee Maker.” 
After analyzing these insights, Nespresso would want to create a coffee machine with all the features in YYY Coffee Maker plus a milk frothing feature, as well as options to prepare lattes and cappuccinos.
SkinCare
Let’s say, L’Oreal wants to manufacture a facemask. The first thing they’ll do is analyze existing products to ensure they make a better facemask than what’s currently on the market. In this example, let’s consider L’Oreal examines “ZZZ night cream.” 
With these insights in hand, L’Oreal would want to develop a facemask that refreshes dull and tired-looking skin within three minutes, offers long-lasting effects (of at least a week), and doesn’t have side effects on sensitive skin.
Conclusion
Competitive product analysis can help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You can then use the information to make your products better and increase your chances of dominating the market.
Make sure to gather the right insights and capitalize on the opportunities that your competitors have ignored. Use our competitive product analysis template to collect all the data in one place.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How can competitive product analysis help predict future market trends? By analyzing competitor weaknesses and customer discussions, you can spot unmet needs. AI tools, in particular, can detect emerging topics and sentiment shifts in real-time. This data acts as a leading indicator, revealing what customers will demand next and allowing you to innovate before your rivals.
What role does customer sentiment play in evaluating competitor performance? Sentiment moves beyond what a competitor offers (features) to how customers feel about it (experience). Negative sentiment reveals a competitor is vulnerable, even if their sales are high. Positive sentiment highlights their true strengths, showing you which features are delighting users and are critical to match or exceed.
How can product reviews reveal hidden opportunities during competitive research? Reviews are a goldmine for finding competitor weaknesses. Look for recurring complaints, especially in 1- and 2-star reviews. These point directly to market gaps. Customers will often explicitly state what they wish the product did, handing you a ready-made feature list for a superior offering.
What are the most common mistakes companies make when interpreting competitor data? A common mistake is focusing only on features and pricing while ignoring customer sentiment. Another is analyzing too few competitors or using a small, skewed data sample. This leads to a flawed view of the market, making it easy to miss emerging trends and be blindsided by new rivals.
How do AI-powered analytics tools improve the accuracy of competitive insights? AI tools eliminate manual bias by analyzing massive datasets from reviews, social media, and more. They process millions of data points to identify statistically significant trends, not just anecdotes. This scale provides a true, 360-degree view of the market, making insights far more accurate and reliable.
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