With over $18.5 billion in revenue and 20% annual growth, affiliate marketing presents plenty of opportunities, but success is never a low-hanging fruit. At the very least, you need to understand how to attract traffic, run campaigns, and convert visitors – and you surely need some time for your organic lead gen strategies to pay off.
In this context, affiliate competitor analysis might help you a ton – a sneak peek into the world of real affiliate marketing where publishers are fighting for traffic and advertisers are hunting for qualified leads and phone calls.
Without any further ado, let’s see how affiliate competitor analysis can kickstart your affiliate marketing journey or make it more cost-effective, helping avoid costly mistakes, irrelevant audiences, and downright fraudulent leads.
What Is Affiliate Competitor Analysis About?
Affiliate competitor analysis boils down to studying what other publishers in your niche are doing: SEO patterns, backlink sources, content formats, promotional channels, paid ads, and the affiliate programs they choose.
You must track your competitors to see real demand, reveal trends early, determine weak spots in your own strategy, and focus effort where it delivers the highest return. Instead of guessing and working “intuitively”, you work with clear data.
How to Conduct a Full-Scale Affiliate Competitor Analysis
If you want to get real insights, you need to go in-depth, examining your rival’s every aspect: how they get traffic, what content they publish, how they run emails and social media, and how they convert visitors into qualified leads.
Define Your Business and Your Competitors
Before diving into competitor research, examine your audience, content style, marketing channels, and unique selling proposition. If you already generate and sell leads, track engagement, traffic sources, conversion rates, and demographics.
By quantifying your business, you clearly establish a starting point and can then identify publishers operating at a similar level and using strategies you can replicate. And then it comes down to taking the best from them and discarding what doesn’t work or fit your business model or objectives.
For instance, if you are an affiliate who runs a small blog, Buzzfeed isn’t your competitor. On the other hand, someone with a similar domain authority, backlink profile, and traffic range, up to 3x your size, can be a good source of knowledge.
Identify Competitor Tiers
Organize competitors into tiers so you don’t mix incomparable players and can get a realistic, strategic view of your niche.
| Tier | Who They Are | Key Characteristics | Why They Matter | How to Use Them in Analysis |
| Tier 1: True Rivals | Direct competitors | Similar traffic rangeComparable DA/DRSame monetization modelOverlapping audience intent | You can immediately replicate their tactics and see results. | Benchmark against them regularly, reverse-engineer their wins, and compare KPIs 1:1. |
| Tier 2: Emerging Players | Smaller affiliates that are growing quickly | Lower traffic but fast momentumFresh content anglesEarly adopters of affiliate marketing trends | They show where new opportunities are starting to form. | Track them for ideas and early signals of niche shifts. |
| Tier 3: Leaders | Authoritative publishers dominate the niche | Huge traffic and authorityLarge editorial teamsStrong multi-channel presenceBroad category coverage | They show the broader direction the market is moving toward. | Study their structure and strategies as “industry maps”. |
Once you separate your competitors into tiers, the analysis becomes much easier. Instead of evaluating every affiliate, you can zero in on the group that matters, avoiding focusing on aspects that are only valid for one or a few affiliates in the group but are irrelevant to the rest of the players.
So what you need is an average profile of a publisher you compete with.
Collect as Much Data as Possible
Of course, effective affiliate competitor analysis is all about data: marketing channels, content optimization strategies, backlinks, authority building, etc. The goal is to understand not just what they do, but HOW and WHY they do it.
| Content & SEO | Examine the topics they cover, keyword difficulty, search volume, content formats, page structure, and user intent. Note that in highly competitive niches, some topics become so saturated that breaking into the first page of search results can require too many resources. That’s why you need to evaluate whether a topic is worthy of your time or if you should switch to another. |
| Social Media | If you want to build a solid social media presence, examine which platforms your competitors use, how often they post, and preferred formats. Review engagement metrics across platforms to understand which content might potentially resonate with your audience. Pay attention to which posts get the most likes, shares, and comments, and who your rivals are collaborating with. |
| Paid Ads | Look at where competitor ads send their traffic and how those landing pages are put together. Pay attention to their targeting settings, how often they run their ads, and whether they change anything during seasonal peaks. |
| Email Marketing | Email marketing allows you to engage with leads directly. Look at how your competitors run their email campaigns: what lead magnets get people to sign up, how often they send messages, and what kind of content they include. Examine how and where they insert links: do they hide them in text, embed them in CTAs, or use banners? Check how they segment the audience and personalize their messaging. Analyze what exactly they do to nurture leads toward the target action. |
Affiliate Competitor Analysis Tools
When conducting affiliate competitor analysis, the tools you choose make a huge difference. It’s easier to have a solution than to try to coordinate several tools.
| Purpose | Tool | What It Does |
| SEO Competitor Discovery | Ahrefs, SEMrush, Serpstat, Moz | Identifies SEO competitors and examines their traffic, top pages, domain authority, and overall performance. |
| Backlink Analysis | Ahrefs, Majestic | Helps examine competitors’ backlinks. |
| Content Gap Analysis | Ahrefs “Content Gap”, SEMrush “Keyword Gap” | Determines what topics or keywords your competitors cover, but you don’t. |
| SERP Analysis | SERPWatcher, SEO Minion, SurferSEO | Analyzes search engine results pages, including featured snippets, ranking patterns, page structure, and metadata. |
| Social Media Competitors | BuzzSumo, YouTube Search | Identifies top-performing competitors on social platforms. |
| Offer Discovery | Awin, Impact, ShareASale, CJ, ClickBank | Tracks which affiliate programs and offers competitors are promoting. |
Go for tools that dig into details and play nicely with each other. This keeps all your data in one place, prevents information from getting lost, and makes it easy to follow your competitors’ strategies from start to finish.
3 Alternative Ways to Find Competitors
Affiliate competitor analysis is a complex, multidimensional process, so you should use both classical and alternative methods to uncover all meaningful players in your niche:
- Niche websites and communities: Browse forums, sub-Reddits, Substack, and X (formerly Twitter) to see what products your audience uses and who they see as the expert.
- Customer reviews: Examine reviews on marketplaces and review sites. Pay attention to whether customers mention specific affiliates as their sources of information.
- Listicles and “Top N” articles: Many listicles are created by publishers to collect traffic, gathering competitors in one place.
Take Competitor Analysis with a Grain of Salt
Teach competitors as knowledge sources, not the universal truth. Try to understand your niche well enough to identify which strategies lead to conversions. You can even collaborate with competitor publishers to build your authority by:
- Guest posting on niche blogs or media outlets with different audience angles
- Co-branding content, such as guides, checklists, or PDFs, is promoted across both platforms
- Collaborating on YouTube, TikTok, etc.
- Mentioning each other in your emails if you are not direct competitors, with only partially overlapping audiences
- Shared research or reports to create unique marketing assets
You don’t need to collaborate with your direct competitors, as you may cannibalize each other’s audiences. Meanwhile, teaming up with affiliates who operate in the same niche but speak to slightly different audiences may work for both of you.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is an affiliate competitor analysis?
Affiliate competitor analysis is studying similar publishers in your niche to see how they drive traffic, promote offers, and run campaigns. Your goal is to understand what works, spot early trends, and find new ways to improve your own campaigns.
How to find competitors in affiliate marketing
Check which sites rank for your target keywords; some of them will be run by affiliates. Take a closer look at them, as well as check the social media and forum presence of competitors and what affiliate networks they partner with.
How to conduct an affiliate program competitive analysis
Focus on your closest competitors. Study their traffic sources, content, and how they advertise their product or service. Look for common patterns and their strengths and weaknesses to uncover opportunities for you.
