How To Use Competitor Intelligence Across Campaigns

Competitor Analysis in Corda helps you understand why competitors hold an advantage. It is not meant to give you a list of links to copy. 

This tutorial explains how to use those findings across multiple campaigns, so that each campaign has a clear purpose and the insights stay useful as things change.

Before you start: you should have a connected website, a completed Website Analysis, and at least one Target Page in mind. If you have already built a page-level strategy, you can use it here.

Step 1: Start With The Campaign Objective

Competitor findings only make sense when you know what you are trying to achieve. For that reason, write down the Campaign Objective first, and then look at the competitors.

This matters because the same competitor can be relevant to one campaign and irrelevant to another. A competitor that ranks well for informational guides may not compete with you on a commercial service page. 

So, before you compare anything, confirm which page, topic, and goal the campaign covers.

Step 2: Choose Competitors For That Objective

The biggest company in your industry is not always the most useful competitor. Instead, choose competitors that share all these:

• product or service
• audience
• topic
• search opportunity
• market or location
• page type, such as commercial or informational

Because the objective changes from campaign to campaign, your competitor set can change too. It is normal to select a different group of competitors for each campaign.

Step 3: Look For The Pattern Behind The Advantage

Once your competitors are selected, review how they compare with you. Corda can compare websites, pages, topics, links, publishers, editorial signals, brand coverage, search visibility, and available AI-led visibility signals.

The most useful question at this stage is what pattern gives the competitor a relevant advantage. A difference in total backlinks does not answer that question on its own. 

It is more helpful to take a look at: 

1. Where the links come from
2. Which pages they support
3. What type of publisher provides them.

For example, competitors may repeatedly receive coverage from the same specialist publisher category, with links pointing to their service pages.

If your links mostly point to the homepage, the gap is about page support and publisher category, not about link volume.

Step 4: Keep Only The Findings That Connect To Your Goal

Not every competitor difference deserves action. To decide which ones do, use these checks:

A finding that passes these checks can become part of the campaign. Findings that do not can be noted and left for later.

Step 5: Turn Findings Into The Right Kind Of Action

Competitor findings can point to different types of work. Matching the finding to the correct action helps you avoid using a placement campaign to solve a problem that a placement cannot fix.

If the Target Page is weak, it is usually better to improve it before you look for publishers. Otherwise, the external support may have little to build on.

Step 6: Assign A Distinct Job To Each Campaign

When one website has several competitor-driven findings, they do not all have to go into one campaign. Similarly, each finding does not need its own campaign. You can group related findings into one broader authority problem.

The goal is for every campaign to have a separate job. Campaigns targeting the same page, publishers, and gap will compete for the same resources. To avoid that, give each campaign its own objective, Target Page, and competitor focus.

A simple way to check this is to complete one sentence for each campaign: 

“This campaign exists to address ___ on ___, compared with ___.”

Step 7: Build The Campaign In Campaign Builder

After grouping the findings, take them into Campaign Builder. The campaign inherits context from your earlier analysis, so you don’t need to start from scratch. It brings together the Authority Goal, Authority Gap, Target Page, topic, Publisher Opportunities, placement mix, budget or criteria, and the rationale.

From there, you can follow Corda’s recommendations or make your own selections. You stay in control either way. You can review recommendations, remove or replace publishers, select publishers manually, and adjust requirements before you approve anything. Corda analyzes and recommends, and you review and decide.

When you assess publishers, focus on Publisher Fit. That means checking whether the publisher suits your page, topic, audience, and goal. Metrics such as DA, DR, or Authority Score add context, but a high metric does not make a publisher a good match on its own.

Step 8: Track Results Against The Original Finding

After launch, measure the campaign against the gap it was meant to address. Counting the links you built does not show whether the problem was solved.

Corda can reuse your original Baseline and supporting signals, and the Live Authority Graph and campaign reporting connect later results to the first assessment. 

This lets you follow the path from Baseline to Gap, then to Campaign, Result, and Reassessment.

Step 9: Refresh Your Competitor View And Reuse What You Learned

Competitors change over time. They publish new content, gain new coverage, and shift their search visibility. Because of this, review competitor intelligence regularly and don’t treat it as a one-time task.

When you review, do two things:

1. Recheck whether your competitor set still fits each campaign objective.
2. Carry what you learned into the next campaign. A publisher category that fits one campaign may also fit another, and an open gap may deserve its own campaign.

This is the loop Corda is built around: Analyze, Understand, Prioritize, Act, Measure, and Reassess.

Ask This, Not That:

**A note on expectations: Corda identifies the authority gaps connected to your objective and recommends actions to address them. It does not guarantee rankings, traffic, placements, AI citations, or authority-score changes.