How Do You Make a Competitor Analysis Template in Excel?

How Do You Make a Competitor Analysis Template in Excel?

Most competitor analysis spreadsheets die within a month. Someone builds a beautiful grid of twelve competitors against thirty attributes, fills it in once, presents it, and never opens it again. The problem is almost never the spreadsheet software. It is that the template was designed to be filled in rather than designed to be maintained.

A competitor analysis template that survives has a specific shape. It separates the things that change weekly from the things that change yearly. It stores one fact per cell so formulas can reach them. And it ends in a number you can sort by, because a comparison nobody can rank is a comparison nobody acts on.

This guide walks through building that template in Excel from an empty workbook: the tabs it needs, the metrics worth tracking, the handful of formulas that do the real work, and how to turn forty columns of research into a score that tells you who to worry about.

How Do You Make a Competitor Analysis Template in Excel?

The short version: build four tabs rather than one sheet.

Create a Competitors tab that lists each rival once with its stable details, a Metrics tab that holds one row per competitor per month for the numbers that move, a Features tab for the attribute-by-attribute comparison, and a Scorecard tab that pulls from the other three with XLOOKUP and produces a weighted score per competitor.

Format every data range as an Excel Table so formulas expand automatically when you add a row. Use data validation to force consistent entries. Then set a monthly reminder and only ever update the Metrics tab.

The reason this beats one wide sheet is that a single grid forces you to overwrite history. Once you overwrite last month's traffic estimate, you lose the only thing that actually matters in competitive analysis: direction of travel. A competitor at 40,000 visits and falling is a very different problem from one at 30,000 and climbing.

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What Goes in a Competitor Analysis Spreadsheet?

Before touching Excel, decide what the spreadsheet is for. A template built to brief a sales team looks nothing like one built to plan content. The four tabs below cover the common ground; the columns you choose inside them are where the judgement happens.

The Competitors tab: facts that rarely change

One row per competitor, and nothing in here should need updating more than once or twice a year. Useful columns:

• Company name, and a short code such as COMP01 that every other tab will reference
• Primary domain, written without the protocol so it stays easy to match
• Segment or tier, so you can filter direct rivals from adjacent ones
• Headcount band, funding stage, and founding year
• Pricing model, in one word: subscription, usage, licence, freemium
• Entry-level published price, and a flag for whether pricing is public at all

Keep this tab boring. Its job is to be the single place where a competitor's identity lives, so that renaming a company or correcting a domain happens once.

The Metrics tab: a log, not a snapshot

This is the tab that makes the template worth maintaining. Instead of one column per metric, use one row per competitor per period, with columns for Code, Month, and then each metric.

Sensible metrics for most teams:

• Estimated organic traffic and number of ranking keywords
• Referring domains and a domain authority or rating figure
• Paid search presence, as a yes or no plus an estimated spend band
• Review count and average rating on the one review site your buyers actually read
• Published pricing for the entry tier, so you capture price rises
• Headcount, which is the cheapest available proxy for momentum

Twelve rows a year per competitor is nothing, and after six months you can chart any metric over time with no restructuring at all.

The Features tab: the attribute grid

This is the part people usually think of as the whole template. One row per feature or capability, one column per competitor, and a consistent vocabulary in the cells.

Use three values and nothing else: Yes, No, Partial. The temptation is to write explanatory sentences in the cells, which immediately makes the grid unsortable and uncountable. Put the nuance in a separate Notes column at the end of the row instead.

The Scorecard tab: the output

Nothing is typed into this tab. It lists each competitor, pulls the figures it needs from the other three tabs, normalises them, applies weights you control in a small block of cells, and produces one number per competitor. This is the only tab you show anyone.

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How Do You Build It, Step by Step?

Step 1: Set up the four tabs and name them

Open a blank workbook and rename the sheets Competitors, Metrics, Features, and Scorecard. Add a fifth called Config if you expect to use dropdown lists, which you will.

Step 2: Turn every range into a Table

Select your header row plus one blank row and press Ctrl + T. On the Table Design tab, give each one a clear name: tblCompetitors, tblMetrics, tblFeatures. This matters more than it looks. Table names let you write XLOOKUP(...) against tblCompetitors[Domain] rather than a fixed range, so adding a competitor never breaks a formula.

Step 3: Add data validation so entries stay consistent

On the Config tab, type your allowed values in short lists: segments, pricing models, and the Yes / No / Partial trio. Then select the relevant column, go to Data, Data Validation, choose List, and point it at the list. This single step prevents the most common failure in shared spreadsheets, which is three people writing Freemium, freemium, and Free tier in the same column and every COUNTIF quietly undercounting.

Step 4: Join the tabs with XLOOKUP

In the Scorecard tab, list your competitor codes down column A. Then pull in whatever you need:

• =XLOOKUP([@Code], tblCompetitors[Code], tblCompetitors[Company]) for the display name
• =XLOOKUP([@Code], tblCompetitors[Code], tblCompetitors[Segment]) for filtering
• =COUNTIFS(tblFeatures[COMP01], "Yes") for a raw feature count

For the latest value of a logged metric, combine MAXIFS with XLOOKUP using a concatenated key, or add a helper column in tblMetrics holding =[@Code] & "|" & TEXT([@Month], "yyyy-mm") and look that up directly. The helper column is less elegant and far easier to debug six months later.

Step 5: Normalise before you weight

Raw metrics cannot be averaged together. Traffic is in tens of thousands and ratings are out of five, so a naive sum is just a traffic ranking wearing a costume.

Convert each metric to a nought-to-one scale first. For a metric where higher is better, use =([@Metric] - MIN(range)) / (MAX(range) - MIN(range)). For one where lower is better, such as price, subtract that result from one.

Step 6: Apply weights in cells, never in formulas

Put your weights in a labelled block on the Scorecard tab: one cell per metric, summing to one. Reference those cells in the score formula with absolute references such as $B$2.

Hard-coding 0.4 inside twelve formulas guarantees that the next person to change priorities edits eleven of them. Weights in cells also let you argue about priorities in a meeting by typing a number and watching the ranking move.

Step 7: Make the output readable

Add conditional formatting data bars to the score column and a three-colour scale to the normalised metrics. Add sparklines in a single column to show each competitor's traffic trend from the Metrics tab, using Insert, Sparklines, Line. Sparklines are the highest-value chart in a competitor template precisely because they are tiny. One column of twelve-month trend lines answers "who is growing" without a single full-size chart.

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When Should You Use a Spreadsheet Rather Than a Tool?

A spreadsheet wins in three situations, and they are more common than tool vendors suggest.

When the comparison includes judgement

No platform can tell you whether a competitor's onboarding is better than yours, how credible their enterprise story is, or whether their pricing page reads as confident or desperate. Qualitative columns are where a spreadsheet is unbeatable, because you can define the scale yourself.

When you need one artefact for a decision

Board papers, pricing reviews, and build-versus-buy arguments need a single ranked table with visible assumptions. A spreadsheet shows its working. A dashboard tends to hide it.

When the competitor set is small and specific

Tracking five named rivals quarterly does not justify a subscription. Tracking two hundred domains weekly absolutely does, and at that point you want an API feeding the sheet rather than a person typing into it.

Where Does a Competitor Analysis Template Fall Short?

Be clear-eyed about the limits before you commit a team to maintaining one.

It goes stale silently

A spreadsheet never tells you it is out of date. Add a Last updated column and a formula such as =IF(TODAY() - [@LastUpdated] > 90, "STALE", "OK") so the file flags its own decay.

The numbers are estimates, and they disagree

Third-party traffic and keyword estimates vary widely between providers for the same domain. They are useful for direction and relative size, not for precision. Record which source a figure came from, in its own column, and never mix sources inside one metric column.

Scores invite false confidence

A weighted score is an argument expressed as arithmetic, not a measurement. Keep the weights visible on the same screen as the ranking so that nobody mistakes the output for an objective fact.

Shared editing breaks it

The moment four people have edit access, validation rules get pasted over and columns get inserted in the middle. Keep one owner, protect the Scorecard and Config sheets, and let everyone else comment.

Excel, Google Sheets, or a Dedicated Tool?

All three have a defensible place, and the right answer depends on how the data arrives.

Choose Excel when the analysis is the deliverable

Excel's advantages here are real: Power Query for reshaping exported CSVs, pivot tables over the Metrics log, and far better behaviour than Sheets on files with tens of thousands of rows. If the output is a document someone will read in a meeting, Excel is the better tool.

Choose Google Sheets when several people research together

Sheets wins on simultaneous editing and on IMPORTHTML and IMPORTXML for scraping the occasional published figure. If three analysts are filling in the Features tab at once, the collaboration advantage outweighs Excel's formula depth. The structure in this guide transfers almost unchanged.

Choose a dedicated tool when the inputs are automated

Once you want traffic, keyword, and backlink figures refreshed without anyone typing, you need a data source rather than a template. The honest pattern for most teams is both: a tool supplies the quantitative columns on a schedule, and the spreadsheet holds the judgement, the weights, and the decision.

Final Thoughts

The difference between a competitor analysis template that gets used and one that gets abandoned is almost entirely structural. Separate the stable facts from the moving numbers, log metrics by month instead of overwriting them, keep one fact per cell, put the weights where people can see them, and end with a single sortable score.

Build the four tabs once and the monthly update is a ten-minute job. That is the only version of this exercise that survives contact with a real quarter.

If the quantitative half is what you are missing, our guide to competitor backlink analysis covers how to source the link and authority figures that belong in the Metrics tab, and how to turn them into something you can act on.

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