How to Do a Competitive Landscape Analysis (If You’ve Never Done It Before)

When planning a trip from one place to another, it helps to know what’s between the two points. How far is the journey? Are there any problems to avoid? Where can we stop to rest? Knowing the path helps us reach our goal safely.

The same idea works in business. As business owners or marketers, we need to understand the market we’re in. There will always be other companies doing similar things, and they can slow us down if we don’t know what they’re doing. That’s why it’s important to understand our competitors clearly.

A competitive landscape analysis gives us the information we need to stay ahead and reach our goals. In this guide, we explain what a competitive landscape analysis is, share common methods used, and show simple ways to do it.

What Is a Competitive Landscape Analysis?

Competitive landscape analysis means studying the market to see who our competitors are and how they compare to us and others in the same space.

It is similar to competitor analysis or market research, but it focuses more on how businesses relate to each other and compete.

We can look at many things during this process, such as:

• Market Share: Analyze their share in the industry compared to competitors.
• Products and Pricing: What products do they offer and at what price points?
• Website Traffic: Volume of visitors, sources of traffic, and engagement metrics.
• Brand Message and Market Position: What message does the brand convey, and how is it positioned in the market?
• Company Growth and Direction: Track expansion, investments, product innovation, and strategic goals.

Since the market keeps changing, this type of analysis should be done regularly. What we find may vary depending on what we choose to study.

There are also many ways to do this. We can use a basic spreadsheet or a detailed matrix chart. No matter the method, the goal is to understand where each player stands and how they connect.

5 Simple Ways to Understand the Competition

There are many ways to study your competitors. Each method can give us different insights. Here are five easy frameworks that help us understand the market and our place in it.

1. SWOT Analysis:

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. We place these in a 2×2 box and write down what fits under each part. It helps us see what we do well, what we need to improve, where we can grow, and what risks we face.

This method is great for planning. It helps us spot new chances and prepare for possible problems.

2. Strategic Group Analysis:

In this method, we group businesses that use similar strategies. These groups, or clusters, help us see how others operate and where we fit in.

We can group them by:

• Types of Products They Offer: Identify the range of goods or services provided.
• Areas They Serve: Geographic locations or markets where their services/products are available.
• Who Their Customers Are: Define their target audience or customer segments.
• How They Sell and Market: Explore their sales channels and marketing strategies.
• Price and Quality: Compare their pricing and product/service quality with competitors.

This helps us find our closest competitors and understand their approach. We can then explore new ways to grow or improve.

3. BCG Matrix:

The BCG Matrix helps us decide where to focus our business. It looks at how fast something is growing and how much market share it has. Then, we place our products into one of these four groups:

• Pets (Dogs): Low growth and low market share – typically candidates for divestiture.
• Question Marks: High growth but low market share – require investment to grow or may fail.
• Stars: High growth and high market share – leaders in a fast-growing market, often need heavy investment.
• Cash Cows: Low growth but high market share – generate consistent cash flow with little investment.

By comparing our products with others, we can decide where to invest, improve, or reduce effort.

4. Perceptual Mapping:

This method helps us understand how people see our brand compared to others. We create a chart using two things like price and quality. Then, we place products on the chart to show where they stand.

Customer feedback is key here. It shows how the market views each product. This helps us plan our next steps and improve our position.

5. Porter’s Five Forces:

Porter’s Five Forces is a helpful method to understand how competitive a market is. It looks at five key areas:

• Industry Rivalry: How strong the competition is among existing players in the market.
• Supplier Power: How much power suppliers have to drive up prices or influence terms.
• Buyer Power: How easy or hard it is for buyers to switch between competitors or leave the market.
• Threat of Substitutes: The risk of other products or services replacing yours.
• Threat of New Entrants: How easy it is for new businesses to enter the market and compete.

This method is useful when we want to step into a new market or grow our product or service. It helps us see what challenges we may face.

Overall Market Landscape Analysis Data

To understand the full market better, we can use the Market Overview dashboard in the Traffic & Market Toolkit. We just enter competitor websites, and the tool shows useful insights about the competition.

The Growth Quadrant is one way to see the competitive landscape. It shows how businesses are doing compared to each other over time. Let’s take the food delivery market as an example.

One chart shows data from April 2025 to May 2025. It shows Seamless had strong traffic and growth, even though it’s not as well-known as DoorDash or Uber Eats.

The Market Summary section gives more details. It shows how fast competitors are growing and what share of the market each one has. The Key Players and Market Size sections show which businesses have the biggest part of the market and how big the total market is.

In April 2025, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) was 5.5 billion, while the Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) was 1.1 billion. Since SAM is only one-fifth of TAM, there is still a lot of room for the market to grow.

DoorDash had the largest share of traffic at 52%. Even though Seamless showed good growth recently, it was not among the top three competitors.

By looking at past data, we can track how the market and business shares have changed over time. For example, in April 2022, DoorDash still had about half of the traffic. But Grubhub was closer to Uber Eats than it is now. This helps us explore what actions helped DoorDash and Uber Eats get ahead.

By 2025, the market size more than doubled compared to 2022. Even though DoorDash’s share grew only a little, the total number of visits grew a lot.

Further in the dashboard, the Market Players chart shows which companies do better in channels like Direct, Search, Referral, and Social. The chart for April 2025 shows this clearly.

In 2022, Uber Eats passed DoorDash in Paid Search by 0.8 million visits. This tells us that smaller players were doing better back then. For example, Seamless had 2 million more visits in 2022 than in 2025. Grubhub also saw drops in Direct and Paid Search visits. These drops are worth looking into so we can learn what caused them.

Audience Landscape Analysis Data

To understand our competitors’ audience, we can use the Traffic & Market Toolkit. It gives useful details about the market audience and how it connects with each competitor. The Demographics dashboard helps us see who the competitors are reaching.

The Audience charts show the age and gender breakdown of users for each competitor. For example, most people using online food delivery services are women, and most are between 25 and 44 years old.

If we look closer, we can compare each competitor. For instance, the blue bars in the graph show Uber Eats. Their users are mostly older, especially in the 45 to 65+ age group. But they have fewer users in the 18 to 44 range compared to others.

The Audience Overlap dashboard shows how much the audiences of DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and Seamless overlap. In April 2025, DoorDash had the most unique visitors, shown by the big green circles. Uber Eats came close. Both also shared a large number of users.

Product Landscape Analysis Data

When we want to learn about how products and services compete, we can use the Top Pages Dashboard and EyeOn in the Traffic & Market Toolkit. These tools give us helpful data.

The Top Pages Dashboard lists the most visited pages of competitors. We can filter the list to find the most useful ones. For example, DoorDash’s Top Pages report for April 2025 shows a page near the bottom with strong visits. This page talks about a benefit from Lyft, showing part of DoorDash’s growth plan. It’s likely aimed at competing with Uber.

We can also see where traffic to each page comes from. For the DoorDash-Lyft page, most visits came from Direct and Organic Search. This shows that they didn’t pay for ads to promote this page.

This view helps us understand how competitors like Uber Eats bring traffic to their pages. Even though most traffic comes directly, referral traffic is also strong. This tells us they likely work with partners to market their services.

EyeOn is another helpful tool that tracks competitor activity. It shows us a timeline of their ads, blog posts, new pages, and social media updates.

For example, EyeOn shows that DoorDash ran a Google ad for sightseeing tours in Casablanca, Morocco. From the timeline, we can click through and see the landing page they used for promotion.

EyeOn also sends weekly emails about competitor updates, like their ads, blog posts, and social media campaigns. Using the timeline, trend graphs, and emails together helps us watch what our competitors are doing. We can keep up with their new services, most popular offers, and overall marketing strategy.

Your Competitive Landscape Report

After finding competitors, choosing how to study them, and collecting the data, the next step is to organize everything. The main goal of this process is to understand the business landscape clearly so we can plan better.

We may need to share these insights with others. There are many ways to do that. For simple reports, a spreadsheet or whiteboard may be enough.

For deeper research, we might use tools like Google Looker Studio (once called Google Data Studio) or Tableau.

No matter which method we choose, it’s helpful to show our findings visually. This makes it easier to understand the connections between businesses.

And it’s okay to be creative! Looking at the same data in different ways often helps us understand things better and explain them more clearly to others.