Competitive Analysis Dashboard: How to Build & Use One

Ever find yourself piecing together competitor data from multiple platforms, only to end up with more numbers than clear next steps?

A competitive analysis dashboard brings those comparisons into one consistent view, making it easier to spot gaps, understand what is driving performance, and decide what to do next.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to build a competitive analysis dashboard that actually makes your work easier.

How is a competitive analysis dashboard different from a traditional competitor analysis report

A competitive analysis dashboard supports recurring monitoring, while a traditional competitor analysis report preserves a point-in-time narrative. The strongest workflow uses both: the dashboard helps you notice movement, and the report explains what it means for leadership or planning.

The biggest value of a dashboard comes from making competitor analysis part of the day-to-day workflow. Marketing teams can check how competitors are performing, investigate sudden changes, compare specific metrics, and return to the same data whenever a new question comes up. 

While reports remain useful for documenting research, communicating strategic takeaways, and giving leadership a concise snapshot of the competitive landscape.

What to Include in a Competitive Analysis Dashboard

A useful competitive analysis dashboard should give you enough context to understand who your competitors are, how they’re performing, and what’s contributing to their results. I’d focus on three core areas: competitor overview, performance benchmarking, and content performance.

The goal is to bring the most important competitive signals into one view, so teams can quickly identify gaps, spot trends, and decide where to dig deeper.

Competitor Overview

I would first start with a clear snapshot of the competitive landscape. The dashboard should make it easy to see which competitors you’re tracking and how your performance compares with theirs.

Here's how it looks like in Socialinsider.

Include:

• Competitors: A list of the brands or profiles included in the analysis.
• Key metrics comparison: A side-by-side view of metrics such as followers, posts, views, etc.
• Key insights summary: A quick overview of the most important findings, such as which competitor is growing fastest, generating the most engagement, or outperforming your brand on specific metrics.

This overview gives you the context needed to interpret everything else in the dashboard. 

Rather than jumping between individual competitor profiles, you can get a quick read on the overall market and identify the areas that deserve a closer look.

For me, this is the dashboard’s starting point: Who are we competing against, where do we stand, and what immediately stands out?

Performance Benchmarking

Performance benchmarking helps you understand how your brand stacks up against competitors across the metrics that matter. A strong dashboard should bring these metrics together so you can identify performance gaps and competitive advantages.

Depending on the platform and data available, track metrics such as:

• Engagement rate and engagement volume
• Reach and impressions
• Video views
• Average engagement per post
• Comments, likes, and shares
• Follower growth

Make sure to look at these metrics together so it provides a more complete picture than focusing on a single number. A competitor with a large audience may generate less engagement per post, while a smaller account may be growing faster or creating significantly more interactions.

I’d also recommend viewing these metrics over time. Trends can reveal whether a competitor’s performance is consistently strong, improving rapidly, or being driven by a short-term spike. This is the reason why I love looking at comparison in the form of graphs on my Socialinsider dashboard.

If you ask me, the real value of performance benchmarking is turning raw numbers into context: Is our performance competitive, where are we falling behind, and which competitors are setting the benchmark?

Content Performance

Metrics tell you what is happening. Content performance helps explain why. This part of the dashboard should help you identify the content strategies that are contributing to competitor performance.

Key areas to track include:

• Content formats: Compare how competitors use videos, carousels, images, text posts, Reels, and other formats.
• Top-performing content pillars: Identify the topics and themes that consistently generate engagement.
• Top-performing posts: See which individual posts have generated the strongest results and examine what they have in common.
• Posting frequency: Understand how often competitors publish and whether their publishing cadence changes over time.

I find this section particularly useful when the goal is to turn competitor research into an actionable content strategy. A dashboard can reveal patterns that are easy to miss when looking at posts individually. For example, here we can see Primevideo consistently getting a higher engagement rate on all the pillars than Netflix.

How to Build a Competitive Analysis Dashboard in Socialinsider

I know it’s compelling to add every single metric to your competitor analysis dashboard. But it would just make your dashboard busy and harder to use.

Instead of trying to answer every question at once, a good dashboard gives you the right data to answer the questions that matter.

Here’s how I build one in Socialinsider:

1. Start by defining your competitive analysis goals

Before adding competitors or obsessing over KPIs, decide what you want the dashboard to help you understand.

Are you trying to:

• Benchmark audience growth?
• Compare engagement performance?
• Understand competitors’ content strategies?
• Track posting frequency?
• Identify their best-performing platforms?
• Find content gaps and opportunities?

Your goal will help determine the data you need. 

At this stage, I also decide which social platforms belong in the analysis. With Socialinsider, you can also benchmark competitors across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and X, giving you a cross-platform view of competitive performance.

2. Create a competitor group

Time to decide who gets a spot on the dashboard.

In Socialinsider, create a benchmark group containing your brand and the competitor profiles you want to analyze. All you need to do is add competitor profiles and then go to the Benchmarks tab. 

The key here is keeping your comparison group relevant.

I’d start with your direct competitors — brands with a similar offering, audience, and market position. This gives you a meaningful benchmark for metrics such as engagement rate, follower growth, posting frequency, and content performance.

You can also create separate groups for different types of competitors:

• Direct competitors: Brands offering similar products or services to the same audience.
• Indirect competitors: Brands solving the same customer need through a different offering.
• Aspirational competitors: Brands you want to learn from because of their exceptional social media performance or content strategy.

The important part is to keep these groups separate. Your direct competitors make sense as a performance benchmark; an aspirational brand can be useful for inspiration and identifying best practices. Putting them all into one comparison group can skew your benchmarks and make the numbers harder to interpret.

I like to think of it as comparing apples with apples and keeping the oranges around for inspiration.

3. Set your reporting period

Choose a timeframe that matches your analysis goal.

A 30-day period can help you understand recent performance. A 90-day period gives you more room to identify consistent trends in growth, engagement, and content performance.

For larger strategic analysis, longer periods can help account for seasonal campaigns and one-off viral posts.

Here’s how to set that in Socialinsider.

4. Select the KPIs that fit your goals

This is where the temptation to add everything kicks in.

Resist it.

Choose KPIs that directly connect to your original goal. If audience growth is the priority, follower growth and growth trends deserve more attention. If content performance is the focus, engagement rate, top posts, content formats, and content pillars become more useful. 

In Socialinsider, you can customize your dashboard by selecting the KPIs that matter to you.

What I love the most is that you can compare key metrics side by side, making it easier to spot who's outperforming the group and where your biggest gaps are.

5. Share the dashboard

Once your dashboard is ready, put it to work. Socialinsider now lets you share a dashboard through a unique link, giving stakeholders a live, read-only view of the selected dashboard. They don’t need a Socialinsider account to view it, and updates to the dashboard are reflected in the shared view.

That makes the final step refreshingly simple: build it, share it, and let everyone work from the same competitive picture.

How to Analyze a Competitive Analysis Dashboard

A dashboard gives you plenty of data to explore. The trick is knowing where to look first. I follow a simple process which I share below.

Start with the biggest performance gaps

Start with the numbers that stand out. Look for areas where your brand is significantly behind competitors, along with metrics where you’re already ahead. 

Ask yourself:

• Where are competitors clearly outperforming us?
• Which metrics are we leading?
• Which gaps could have the biggest impact on our strategy?

Look for the ‘why’ behind the numbers

A gap tells you where something is happening. Your next job is figuring out why.

Dig into the content and context behind the numbers. Look at:

• Content formats
• Content topics and pillars
• Posting frequency
• Campaigns
• Platform performance
• Audience differences

For example, a competitor’s higher engagement rate might come from a particular content format they use consistently. With Socialinsider, you can go to any competitor profile and dig deep into their posts, format that gets them the highest engagement, content pillars they use, etc. 

For example, here I can see that the top performing format for Primevideo is Reel followed by carousel and image.

When I compare it with Netflix, they get their highest engagement from images as a format. Maybe that’s a gap Primevideo can look into.

Separate outliers from repeatable patterns

Every competitor has that one post that goes completely wild. Resist the urge to immediately rebuild your content strategy around it.

One viral post can generate millions of views or engagements without representing the competitor’s overall strategy. Look across multiple posts and longer time periods to identify patterns that keep showing up.

Check whether:

• A format consistently performs well
• A content pillar repeatedly generates engagement
• Growth remains strong over time
• Similar campaigns produce similar results

I’d give more weight to repeatable performance than spectacular one-offs. Patterns tell you what a competitor has figured out. Outliers tell you something interesting happened.

Find opportunities, not just competitors to copy

The best competitive insight might be hiding in something your competitors aren’t doing.

Look for areas where competitors have weak performance, limited content, or little presence. 

Then compare those gaps with what audiences actually respond to. You might find an underserved topic, an underused format, or a platform where competition is relatively low.

For example, if several competitors consistently focus on product-led content while educational content generates stronger engagement, that could signal an opportunity to build around education.

Use competitor data to find white space, not create a copycat content calendar.

Translate findings into experiments

A competitive insight becomes useful when it changes what you do next.

Turn promising findings into small, measurable experiments. If competitors consistently see strong engagement from a particular format, test your own version. If a content topic repeatedly performs well, build a short series around it. If posting frequency appears linked to growth, experiment with your cadence.

Define the format, topic, timeframe, and KPI before launching the test. Then measure the result against your existing performance and the original benchmark.

Common Competitive Analysis Dashboard Mistakes

• Tracking too many metrics: More data doesn’t automatically mean better analysis. Focus on the KPIs that connect directly to your competitive analysis goals. 
• Copying competitors instead of understanding them: Your competitor’s winning Reel, posting schedule, or content pillar can be a useful clue. Dig into why it works for their audience before adding your own version to the content calendar.
• Building a dashboard nobody actually uses: A beautiful dashboard sitting untouched is just an expensive screenshot. Keep it focused, easy to scan, and relevant to the questions your team actually needs to answer.
• Looking at snapshots instead of trends: A single reporting period can tell you what happened. Tracking performance over time tells you whether it’s a pattern. Look at sustained changes in engagement, growth, reach, and posting activity.

Turn Dashboard Findings Into Your Next Social Decision

End every dashboard review with one decision. Use this five-part template: state the gap, explain the likely driver, propose one test, assign an owner, and define the next review date.

For example: “Our video engagement is below the direct-competitor range across two periods. The likely driver may be topic relevance rather than posting volume. The content lead will test a clearer opening in one existing pillar, and the team will review results on the next monthly reporting date.” Label that statement as a hypothesis until your own data supports it.

Competitor analysis should inform your strategy instead of making your brand copy another account. If you want a ready dashboard instead of bringing metrics from all over the place and building one, try Socialinsider for free for 14 days.