The channel comparison explained: eight channels, public sources, and what they can't show

Why look beyond the website

The website comparison scores what happens after the click. The channel comparison looks at what brings the visitor there and what brings them back: ads, social, email and reviews.

A strong website with weak marketing has few people to sell to. Strong ads that land on a weak page waste the clicks. Look at both and you see the whole journey, from the first ad to the second order.

Use the same rivals as your website comparison, so the two line up. You can run it yourself with the sources below.

The eight channels and their public sources

Each business, yours and up to three rivals, is looked at on the same eight channels.

1. Paid social

What to assess: how many ads are live, how long each has been running, formats, offers, landing pages and how much testing is going on. Public source: the Meta Ad Library, which lets you search an advertiser, filter by active or inactive ads and see when each ad started running.

2. Paid search and Shopping

What to assess: visibility on key product searches, ad copy and whether each ad matches its landing page. Public sources: the Google Ads Transparency Center, which shows the ads an advertiser has served on Google platforms and can be filtered by date and location, plus ordinary searches you run yourself.

3. Organic social

What to assess: how often each business posts, the mix of content, how much people engage and whether comments get replies. Public source: the profiles themselves.

4. Email and SMS

What to assess: the welcome sequence, how often emails arrive, discount depth, and whether a left basket triggers a reminder. Public source: a seed inbox, meaning a dedicated business address signed up to each brand, plus a test basket left on each site. Unsubscribe once the analysis is finished.

5. Reviews and reputation

What to assess: volume, rating, how often the business replies, and the complaints and praise that recur. Public sources: review platforms, Google reviews and on-site product reviews.

6. Off-site SEO

What to assess: links from other sites, rankings for important searches and the content that earns attention. Public sources: third-party SEO tools, whose figures are estimates.

7. Tracking and measurement

What to assess: whether the Meta Pixel, GA4, Google Ads tags, the TikTok pixel and consent mode appear to be installed. Public sources: browser tag inspectors and page source. Broken tracking weakens every paid channel, so this is often where the quickest fix sits; see tracking and measurement checks.

8. Marketplaces, affiliates and influencers

What to assess: presence on large marketplaces, affiliate listings, creator content and discount-code sites. Public source: manual checks.

What analysis adds to the raw evidence

Collecting the evidence is half the job. The other half is reading all of it, for all four businesses, against one standard.

• Grouping. Sorting every ad by hook, format, offer and angle, and every review by theme, so patterns become visible.
• Comparing like with like. Scoring each channel for each business against the same standard, so a strong score means the same thing everywhere.
• Connecting channels. Checking whether the promise in an ad is kept on the landing page, or whether the praise in reviews ever appears in the ads.
• Judgement. Deciding whether a gap matters for this business, its margins and its market, and cutting anything that does not stand up.

Reading every live ad, email and review across four businesses by hand is slow. That is the work our planned competitor ad watch loop, currently in build, is designed to repeat.

What public sources cannot show

Know the limits before you draw conclusions.

• Ad libraries show which ads are live, not how they perform. You can see that an ad exists and when it started. You cannot see its spend, clicks or sales.
• Long-running ads are a hint, not proof. An ad that keeps running may be working, or may have been forgotten. Treat it as a hypothesis.
• Third-party estimates are ranges. Spend, traffic and keyword figures from SEO and ad tools are approximate. Present them as ranges and say where they came from.
• Tag inspection shows what loads, not what is recorded correctly. You can see that a tag fires on a rival's page; you cannot see whether their conversions are counted accurately.

Every finding from a channel comparison is an observation or a hypothesis, never a proven cause, and any estimate of improvement is a range, not a promise.

Doing it ethically

• Never click a rival's paid ads to see where they lead. Each click costs them money. Use the ad libraries and transparency tools instead.
• Use a dedicated business address for seed inboxes, and unsubscribe once the analysis is done.
• Leave test baskets without paying, and do not create fake orders or bookings.
• Respect robots.txt if you fetch pages with any automated tool.
• Stick to public information. Do not try to reach anything behind a login.

Outside-in versus inside-out

A channel comparison is an outside-in view. It needs no access to anyone's accounts and shows how you compare with rivals: fewer live ads than the leader, missing tracking, a thin welcome sequence, unanswered reviews.

An inside-out audit is different. It uses access to your own ad accounts, analytics and email platform to find where your own budget and effort are being wasted: search terms that never convert, campaign structure problems, inaccurate conversion tracking, underperforming flows and audiences.

The two answer different questions, and they work best in that order. The outside-in view tells you where the gaps are against your market; the inside-out view tells you what is happening to your own money. We are building an own ads audit loop for the second; it is in build and not yet available.