Training Guide

Using Consumer
Research for
Competitor Analysis

Brandwatch | Consumer Research

What This ● Introduction
Guide Covers
● Being Data Ready

● Competitor Analysis

● Group Analysis

Click the links to jump straight to that

section. For more information visit our
Help Center.
 Competitor Analysis

Introduction
This guide has been created to help you understand what a
competitor analysis is and how to create your own in Brandwatch.

Competitive intelligence is about more than knowing what your

competitors are doing. It’s about getting to know the landscape in
which your organization, products, and services exist, defining the
metrics your business will use to measure success, and using that
information to make better strategic decisions.

Follow the steps in this guide to learn how to create your own
competitor analysis.
Competitor
Query
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Create a Competitor Query

Take a look at our training videos if you need help writing a
query, or take a look at our Brand Query Writing guide.

Your first step is that you will need to create a seperate query for
each of your competitors. Ensure each query is given equal balance
with the operators and key terms to fairly represent each brands
conversation.

Remember to use a wide variety of the boolean operators to

gather as much relevant data in each of your queries.
Create a
Dashboard
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Creating a Dashboard
After clicking, “Add Dashboard,” you can select the blank template
Having a competitor dashboard at the ready will help ensure that you
and then the data source:
are ahead of your competitors. Whether its for understanding your
competitor’s sentiment, trends, or campaigns, a well-designed
competitor dashboard will allow you to culminate and analyse their
wealth of conversation all in one.

With your queries on hand, it's now time to bring your data to life. By
building a blank dashboard, you can create a setup that has exactly
what you need. This will allow you to conduct a deep-dive analysis on
each of your competitors, and to benchmark each competitor in your
market against one another in separate tabs, removing the need for
multiple dashboards.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Creating Tabs
Tabs are a great way to navigate and organise a dashboard.
Think of your tabs as chapters of a book, opening to the part of the
story you wish to read.

Each tab has a filter bar. This allows you customise what data it
displays - from Data, to Date ranges, to Content Sources. Utilise
these filters will help display conversation in a way that speaks to
you.

For your competitor dashboard, create a series of tabs to dive into

each individual query, followed by a collaborative tab featuring our
query group, allowing us to conclude individual insights with direct
comparisons.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Creating Tabs
Individual brand tabs are all about understanding your industry,
putting you a step ahead of your competition and being able to
actively foresee changes that not only impact your competition,
but could impact your own brands - for better or for worse.

In your individual brand tabs, we can focus on each of your

competitors on their own.

After the first tab is complete, you can easily duplicate it and
change the data source so each competitor tab examines the
same data. You can do this by clicking into your tab filters bar,
hitting duplicate, and then changing the data source of the newly
duplicated tab.

Let’s look at some components we recommend including.

 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Volume Over Time

The Volume Over Time component is vital for understanding
the ongoing volumes of conversation about your brand or
search topic, as well as understanding the landscape of your
competitors’ conversations.

Starting with understanding your competitors bigger picture

will give you a clear insight into their volumes of conversation.
Use this as a starting place to dive deeper and investigate
areas that appear of interest.

Use Iris to explore the drivers in conversation, and what

your consumers care about most.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Customising
Volume Over Time
The customisation bar that runs along the top of each component
allows us to move deeper into understanding our volumes.

Use the breakdown to view your data from new perspectives such as
sentiment or page type, this will allow you to start to understanding
the detail of volumes are changing.

Top breakdowns:

● Sentiment - Is your competitor experiencing shifts in

sentiment?
● Emotion - Gain further insight into your conversations
sentiment.
● Content Sources - Where are they being spoken about?
● Mention Type - Is original content flowing or retweets going
viral?
● Gender - Utilise Twitter demographic insights.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Benchmarking
Are your competitors’ volumes on the rise? How are metrics
such as sentiment and mention type tracking? By using the
benchmark component, we can further understand these
changes.

Understand the peaks in conversation we’ve identified in our

volume over time component by benchmarking against a
previous date range. With different breakdowns available you
can start to understand if conversation, sentiment,
demographics, location and more are rising or falling in
comparison to what they previously were.

Benchmarking is valuable to businesses because it allows you

view how you measure up against your competitors and also
plays a part in collaborating an insight into overall volume
changes within your industry.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Sentiment &
Share of Voice
The sentiment component is designed to allow you to
better understand of how consumers feel about your brand
and your competitors. By default, the component will break
down by a pie chart, and you can click into each piece of
the pie to further explore positive, negative, and neutral
mentions.

As with the volume over time component, the sentiment

component can be customised to reveal additional
insights, like share of voice. By changing the breakdowns,
you can reveal the share of voice each competitor has in
your query group. This is great to see which brand is being
talked about most, and why.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Word Cloud
Utilise the word cloud component to understand the trends
and topics around your competitors brand, and to identify how
you can differentiate your brand.

Customize the word cloud to display a variety of breakdowns

such as organisations, people, and phrases being spoken in
relation to the brand. Further segment and isolate smaller
pockets of conversations, such as negative conversation or
specific content sources, to gain deeper insights about key
topics of conversation surrounding a brand.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Top Sites

The top sites component displays the top websites where

your brand or competitor has been mentioned. The data
table includes volume of mentions and sentiment metrics,
site ranking, site visitor information, impact, reach, and
more. You can sort the table to organize by the metric of
your choosing by simply clicking in the headers of each
column.Gather

Competitor
Competitor Group
Conclude
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Retweeted Content

The retweeted content component enables you to easily

monitor what content has struck a chord with each brand's
audience on Twitter. A great aspect of this component is
that you can start understanding what type of visual
content is being posted alongside each brand.

Utilise this component to start interacting with your

audience and generate content aligned with the posts that
resonate with them most.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Groups
Grouping is essential to competitor analysis because it allows you to
combine multiple data sources and compare data between several
data sources.

Groups will let you to easily compare your chosen brands (such as
volumes, mutually occurring topics and trends etc.) whilst still
keeping each query string unique.

On the left hand side of the main menu click Data > Groups

From here, you’ll be able to choose which data sources to include in

the group.
Competitor Analysis
Tab
In this guide, we’ve shown just a small selection of
components available for diving into our competitors
individually.

But what about our query group?

Let’s take a look at how we can utilise our components to

view our competitors compared side by side.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Market Share
A familiar component but when broken down by the volume
for the query groups, and set to displaying queries this chart
will show you the share of voice for each brand in that group.

This will reveal your landscape, and who is holding the most
voice.

Remember to compliment and explore findings with other

components and isolate in your individual brand tabs. Does
the largest voice always mean the best voice, or are some of
these shares hiding an emerging issue?
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Performance
Benchmarking
As we’ve seen, benchmarking gives context to our volumes.
But how does each brand’s share of conversation stand in
relation to the previous date range?

Display your query group and the breakdown and see their
volumes benchmarked to your data range. This will
compliment the share of voice component, adding further
context and perspective to those volumes.

Combine with further restrictions using the filter bar. Want to

track negativity towards each brand? Display negative
mentions only in the filter bar to see the shift in each
competitors sentiment.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Volume Over Time

With your query groups set as the data source (component
filter > group) you can display each brands volume over your
chosen date range all at once.

Iris will come in handy here, scanning each brand’s volumes

and opening up the drivers within each.

Don't forget about the filter bar. Want to view social only?
Simply isolate social by choosing content sources. Filters will
allow you to track volumes the areas that matter to you.

With all of the components in this tab, you will need to

change the data source to the competitor group. It will
automatically be set to data.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Comparing Topics
It just wouldn't make sense to apply the query group to a
word cloud component, unless we wanted the entire group
combined.

To overcome this, create multiple clouds, each unique to an

individual data source.

This will result in a clear comparison of topics that are

rising to the forefront. As with our previous word cloud,
dive into refined conversation areas with the customise
and filter bars.

To rearrange your components, click on the top of the

component and drag it to the desired location.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Custom Chart
The custom chart component will take your query groups
one stage further by allowing control of all axis.

Using the customise bar, we can display our groups, but

also change what breakdown we would like to view. This
means we can customise one axis as each brands volume,
and on the other axis view breakdowns such a sentiment
and page type.

The custom chart delivers multiple insights all at once.

 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Categories and
Tags
With such a wealth of competitor information available,
why not utilise categories and tags? Dive further into your
competitors’ conversation by building a category or tag
around their services, product(s), or complaints to
understand unique areas of their business.

Combine this with your query group for a truly unique and
personalised insight.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Personalised
Breakdowns
Finally utilising a user defined category, jump back into the
custom chart to personalised to your brands breakdown.
Utilise this categories to personalise and compare the
breakdown for each brand.

These categories can be any subject that you would like to

divide your brand up by, services, products or perhaps
popular topics. Apply these categories as a breakdown for a
result of back to back comparison.

The ‘view’ button in the components header allows for

different ways of displaying your visualisation. Test these
out to see which works best with your setup.
 Set up Competitor Competitor Group Conclude

Conclusion
A competitor analysis is an important part of any brand development. The
importance lies in the understanding of competitors, their consumer
voice, and how this can impact your brand and market landscape.

More importantly, competitor analysis also allows a brand to assess its

own online voice versus their competitors and learn from their
competitive data. A competitor analysis provides a brand with the
knowledge to leverage its strengths, address its weaknesses and, take
advantage of weaknesses of competitors.

Finally, a competitor analysis also gives your brand a better

understanding of your overall industry and where the emerging
opportunities may lie.
Competitor
Analysis
We hope you found this guide
useful and can start making the
most out of your data in
Brandwatch.

Take a look at our Help Center if

you need any further help, or sign up
for one of our webinars to build on
your knowledge.
 Competitor Analysis

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