How to Find and Use Competitive Benchmarks That Actually Inform Strategy

Enterprise marketing generates vast amounts of data, but identifying which metrics matter the most remains a challenge. When managing high monthly budgets, this issue becomes expensive because every mistake incurs additional costs. Fortunately, focusing on the right benchmarks can turn this difficulty into a benefit. Here’s how to turn competitor data into better performance and smarter budget decisions.

What Makes a Benchmark Useful?

Not all benchmarks are created equal. The industry averages you see in marketing reports are often as useful as comparing a Ferrari’s performance to a Pinto. For enterprise marketers managing significant budgets, three critical factors determine whether a benchmark is leading you on a successful path or a dead end.

Spend Tier Alignment

Enterprise brands with $100K+ monthly media spend face completely different challenges than smaller advertisers, and your competitive benchmarks marketing¹ analysis needs to reflect this reality.

Category Nuances

After establishing spend tier alignment, there are industry differences that add another layer of complexity to competitive benchmarks and marketing analysis. Think of them like different types of restaurants. A fast-food chain and a fine-dining restaurant measure success in completely different ways. Similarly, some brands require higher creative velocity benchmarks² because they launch new products frequently, while other brands can sustain the same creative for longer but need much higher quality standards.

Meanwhile, wellness brands often require educational content that performs differently from impulse-purchase categories. A company selling supplements will have video completion rates different from those of a fashion retailer, as the purchase decision process involves various levels of consideration and trust-building.

Funnel-Stage and Creative Format Context

Beyond category considerations, understanding where and how your audience views your ads matters for benchmark relevance. Performance media benchmarks vary dramatically based on where prospects see your ads and in what format, because different stages have different jobs³.

Top-of-funnel campaigns need to grab attention from people who don’t know your brand yet, while bottom-funnel campaigns target people already thinking about buying. So, these campaigns will have two totally different thumbstop rate benchmarks⁴. For example, a video ad targeting cold audiences might succeed with a 35% thumbstop rate because these viewers need time to figure out if your brand is worth their attention. That same 35% would, however, be bad for retargeting campaigns because people who already know your brand should engage more.

The Tools That Deliver Credible Competitive Benchmarks

Understanding what makes benchmarks useful sets the foundation, but you need access to credible competitive intelligence to really start building. These tools provide a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs works like a competitive radar system for organic search. Beyond basic keyword tracking, it shows which competitors are winning in your category. But the best part? It shows you how they’re doing it, which can provide you with a blueprint of how to move forward. Specifically, the platform’s Share of Voice metrics help you understand whether your organic visibility is gaining ground or losing market share to competitors, while backlink analysis reveals the content and partnerships driving their authority.

SEMrush

There are many elements to paid search strategies that competitors want to keep from each other. SEMrush pulls back the curtain, allowing you to track ad copy changes, budget shifts, and keyword bid strategies over time.

Most importantly, it shows you what competitors are paying per click (CPC), which helps determine whether your bidding strategy or ad relevance needs to be reviewed. Let’s say you’re paying $15 per click while similar brands pay $8 for the same keyword. This difference indicates it’s time to make some changes. Similarly, if your click-through rate (CTR) is 2% while competitors hit 4%, their ad copy is connecting more effectively with searchers.

As a result, you can benchmark your own search performance against brands spending at similar levels. This insight will come in handy when planning budget allocation and identifying unexplored keyword opportunities.

Google Market Insights

Google Market Insights provides information that many other tools lack. While third-party platforms offer competitive intelligence, Google’s first-party data reveals broader category trends and audience behaviors for your set keywords, informing strategic positioning. This context helps distinguish between seasonal fluctuations and genuine competitive gains or losses.

Motion

Motion helps you see how your ads are truly performing with clear data, rather than relying on gut feelings and guesswork. The tool tracks thumbstop rate benchmarks across all your ads, showing which ones grab attention and which people scroll past.

Motion also shows when your ads are getting tired. This happens when the same creative runs too long and people start ignoring it. Motion catches this early, before your campaign performance drops and costs you money. This early warning system is especially valuable when you’re spending large budgets, because small performance drops can become expensive quickly.

Foreplay

Foreplay works like a digital filing cabinet for competitor ads. It saves examples of what other brands in your space are doing, so you can see what’s working for them. This insight helps you understand the creative standards in your industry.

The tool also compares and measures your creative variety against top performers in your field. So, if successful competitors are using 10 different ad formats while you’re only using three, that gap might explain why their performance is better. Foreplay shows you these gaps so you can fill them with effective creative approaches.

Google Trends

Google Trends shows you what’s happening in your market. When your campaign performance changes, you need to know if it’s because competitors stepped up their game or because fewer people are interested in products from your field right now.

For example, if your fitness supplement ads perform worse in January, Google Trends can offer insights into why. It may indicate that people are searching for fitness products less as they recover from the holidays, or if your competitors have already captured the New Year’s resolution crowd. This context changes how you respond, whether you need different creative or you might just need to wait out a temporary trend.

How to Use Benchmarks to Guide Creative and Media Decisions

Having good tools and data creates opportunities, but the real value comes from using that information to make informed decisions. The best enterprise marketers use benchmarks to identify problems before they hurt performance and find opportunities before competitors notice them.

Early Warning Signs

When your thumbstop rate benchmarks start dropping compared to others in your industry, your creative may be stale. Fortunately, this usually happens before your CTR declines, so your campaign performance shouldn’t be hurt. That said, thumbstop rate decreases are still an important signal. It’s like getting a warning light in your car; fix the problem now before it becomes expensive.

This early warning system works especially well for seasonal brands and holiday campaigns. During busy shopping seasons, the difference between refreshing your creative at the right time versus too late can make or break your quarterly results.

Match Your Industry’s Pace

As we mentioned earlier, different industries need different speeds when it comes to new creative. By comparing your creative velocity benchmarks with those of industry leaders, you can determine the right pace for your market. For instance, fashion brands might need 15 to 20 new creative pieces every week to stay competitive, as trends change quickly. However, a B2B software company might only need three to five new variations a week because its audience makes slower decisions.

Knowing these standards helps you gauge your cadence and avoid two problems: wasting money on unnecessary creative and falling behind competitors because you’re not creating enough fresh content.

Test What Matters Most

Performance media benchmarks show you where your biggest opportunities are hiding. Instead of testing random changes to your campaigns, you can focus on areas where the data suggests you’re underperforming compared to similar brands. So, if your video completion rates are 20% below category benchmarks, you know to test different video lengths, opening hooks, or storytelling approaches. This targeted testing approach gets you better results faster than trying random improvements.

Knowing the different benchmarks can also benefit incremental testing and budget reallocation, while helping you set realistic KPIs by channel and campaign type.

Sources

(9 May 2025). Why Competitive Benchmarking Is Essential for Business Growth. LSI. Retrieved July 21, 2025, from https://lsiwins.com/why-competitive-benchmarking-is-essential-for-business-growth
Hellman, K. Creative Velocity: The Secret to Outpacing Ad Fatigue and Scaling Performance Marketing. Plug.inc. Retrieved July 21, 2025, from https://www.plug.inc/insights/creative-velocity-the-secret-to-outpacing-ad-fatigue-and-scaling-performance-marketing
Brand, E. How to Stop a Scroll in 3 Seconds. Motionapp. Retrieved July 21, 2025, from https://motionapp.com/thumbstop-guide/how-to-stop-a-scroll-in-3-seconds
What Is Performance Marketing? Definition and Beginner’s Guide. Shopify. Retrieved July 21, 2025, from https://www.shopify.com/blog/performance-marketing