Which channel to fund next: a public-evidence approach

Eight channels to compare

We group marketing into eight channels for comparison:

• Paid social
• Paid search and Shopping
• Organic social
• Email and SMS
• Reviews and reputation
• Off-site SEO
• Tracking and measurement
• Marketplaces, affiliates and influencers

Tracking is on the list deliberately. If tracking is broken, every other channel looks worse than it is, and every budget decision is made on bad numbers.

Outside-in: what anyone can see

For each rival, gather what is publicly visible:

• Paid social: the Meta Ad Library lets you search ads running on Meta's apps by advertiser, filter by active or inactive status, and see when each ad started running.
• Paid search: the Google Ads Transparency Center is a searchable repository of advertisers and the ads they have served, with filters for date and location. Manual searches add context.
• Organic social: the profiles themselves: posting frequency, content mix and replies.
• Email: sign a dedicated business address up to each rival, record the welcome and basket emails, and unsubscribe once the analysis is done.
• Reviews: public review sites and product reviews.
• Tracking: which tags and consent setup each public site loads.

Do not click rivals' paid ads to study them; each click costs them money, and the transparency tools give you what you need.

Inside-out: what only you can see

Public evidence tells you what rivals do, not what works for them. Pair it with your own data: which channels already bring customers, your margins, your capacity to fulfil more orders, and what you have tried before. A channel where a rival is very active but your margins cannot support the cost of acquisition is not the right next step, however busy it looks. Equally, a channel no rival uses well can be an opening, if your own customers are there.

Score the gaps

For each channel, note where you stand against rivals: behind, level or ahead. Then rate each gap for effort and for likely impact, low, medium or high.

Hypothetical example: a pet supplies shop finds rivals have long-running ads in the Meta Ad Library and active welcome email flows, while it has neither. Its reviews are stronger than all three rivals'. The method points towards email first (lower cost, uses existing customers and traffic) and to using its review themes in any paid social it then tests. That is a hypothesis to test, not a guaranteed result.

Fund small, measure, then scale

Pick one channel, set a modest test budget, and decide in advance what result would make you spend more. Our free ad spend tool helps you think through what a test needs to show. Check tracking before you start, so the result you get is the real one.

Write the test down before it starts: the channel, the budget, the audience or keywords, what you will measure, and the result that would justify more spend. Agreeing that in advance stops a disappointing test being explained away, and stops a lucky early result being over-read.

If the test works, scale it. If it does not, the comparison gives you a second candidate rather than a guess.

Common traps

A few mistakes come up again and again when businesses use competitor evidence to choose a channel:

• Copying the busiest rival. A rival with many active ads may be testing hard because nothing is working yet. Activity is not the same as success.
• Ignoring the cheap channels. Email, reviews and fixing tracking often cost far less than a new paid channel, and they make every later channel work harder.
• Funding several channels at once. If you start paid social, a new email flow and a marketplace listing together, you will not know which one made the difference.
• Forgetting the website. More traffic to a site that converts poorly is an expensive way to learn that the site needed work first.
• Treating estimates as facts. Third-party tools that estimate rivals' traffic or keyword spend are estimates. Use them for direction, not for precise numbers.

For service firms the same thinking applies with different channels. A solicitor or accountant may find that rivals win on reviews and local search rather than on paid social, and an estate agent may find the gap is in how quickly enquiries are answered. The method is the same: look at what is visible, compare it with your own data, and test the most promising gap first.

Next step

Our guide to the channel comparison explains the method in more depth, including the ethics of each public source. For the website side of the picture, an Intel loop compares your site with up to three rivals you choose. The competitor ad watch loop is in build and not on sale.