1. How long is their campaign running? If it is more than a few months guaranteed they are getting a return on that campaign.
2. Ask your partners, manufacturers, customers and anyone in your market what they know. You would be surprised at how much business intelligence you can get if you made it a project.
3. Get into Yahoo Site Explorer and see what is going on with link backs and Page Rank value.  If you have a competitor cleaning up on links with good PR value than you know you need to get serious about your link building strategy quickly.
4. What are the landing pages and conversion mechanisms your competitors are using? You can get a ton of insight into positioning, keyword focus and list building strategies.

Know your competition and copy what is working.  You can also find a competitive positioning that will have a bigger impact for your busienss in your market.

You don’t have to reinvent to be a successful marketer.

Any other ideas about competitive analysis?

Think about it.  With a little reverse engineering, you can find out how your customers search for solutions that your products and services can help solve. New tools let you easily find important competitive information like back links, campaign length and targeted keywords.  Doing this work can give your business a huge competative advantage.  The problem is most businesses jump right into social media tactics and skip this important step.

Use this opportunity to your advantage.  Here are some key steps to take right now to win the digital marketing advantage.  We have a more detailed view of this process in our special report “Digital Forensics”.

1) Keyword Research: This is such an important part of the process but often left to junior staff or worse, outsourced to people who do not understand your business.  Identifying keywords and phrases with good volume, less competition, high commercialization and solid economics is tough.  Make sure you have a process set up for your business to evaluate your keyword targeting strategy.

2) Competition Inventory: Who is serving your market, what is their USP, how does that translate into keyword targeting, campaign longevity, customer conversion mechanisms and landing pages.  Identify what works for your competitors and use it.  Find gaps in their strategy and exploit them.

3) Customer Behavior:  What do customers want versus need?  Find the top 5-6 forums and blogs that your customers are hanging out in and listen.  How do they describe their problems and needs.  Look for psychological triggers that can help you get an edge in your business positioning and copy.

Make sure you are taking advantage of the research phase of your digital marketing planning.  You will be rewarded for it in market share and profits.