Competitive Pulse is live: one screen for your competitive position, with a ranked action plan to lower CAC
Most ecommerce CMOs and growth leaders we talk to have the same Sunday night. Open eight tabs, pull competitor email captures from one tool, scrape ad creative from another, audit social manually, eyeball the competitor's site for the new promo, paste it all into a deck, write three takes, send to the team for Monday standup. Five hours, five tools, one number that nobody trusts by Wednesday.
We just shipped Competitive Pulse to fix that. It is one screen that scores your competitive position across email, ads, social, and promotions, against the competitors you pick. It surfaces your strongest area, your biggest opportunity, and a ranked action plan to lower CAC. Every score expands into the data and weighting behind it. Every action drills into the ShopVision Agent for bespoke analysis. Open it Monday, pick the top action, see what moved by Friday.
This post walks through what Competitive Pulse does, why we built it the way we did, and how it fits inside the rest of the ShopVision platform. If you'd rather just see it, request a demo at the bottom of this post.
What is Competitive Pulse?
Competitive Pulse is the market and competitive intelligence dashboard for ecommerce CMOs, heads of growth, and brand leaders. It replaces the Sunday-night benchmarking deck.
You pick the competitors that matter. ShopVision continuously tracks them across four CAC-shaping channels: email, ads, social, and promotions. Competitive Pulse scores each one. The output is one composite number, your position vs. your chosen set, plus four sub-scores and a ranked list of actions tied to lowering CAC.
It is real-time. The data refreshes as the market moves, so the score you see Monday morning reflects what your competitors did over the weekend, not what they did in the last quarterly review.
The Sunday-night problem
Two things have been true for ecommerce CMOs since 2023.
The first is that customer acquisition is getting more expensive every quarter. Across 4.8 million Shopify merchants, average CAC rose from $274 to $318 between 2024 and 2026, a 16.1% jump in a single year. Ecommerce CAC overall is up roughly 60% over five years. Meta's Q4 CPMs averaged $22.98 in 2025 and peaked above $25 during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Google Ads CPCs climbed almost 13% year over year. Eighty-eight percent of subscription DTC brands reported higher acquisition costs in 2025 than the year before.
The second is that marketing budgets have flatlined. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey put marketing budgets at 7.7% of company revenue, the lowest level the survey has recorded.
Rising input costs and flat budgets force the same question every Monday: where is the gap, and what do I do about it this week. The answer used to come from a stack of point tools, an analyst, and Sunday night. We thought it should come from one screen and an agent.
The four signals we score
Competitive Pulse scores competitive position on four channels because these four are where customer acquisition is won or lost in ecommerce.
Email. What competitors send, how often, what they promote, what their welcome and abandonment flows look like, how they treat list segmentation. Email is the cheapest channel in retention math and the slowest to update in most brands. Competitor email cadence and creative is the leading indicator of where their margin pressure is.
Ads. Where competitors spend on Meta, Google, TikTok, and programmatic. What creatives they run, which audiences they target, what landing experiences they push. Ad share of voice tells you whether you are buying into a category that is getting more or less crowded, and your CPM tells you how much that crowding costs.
Social. What competitors post, what gets engagement, where they show up across organic, influencer, and paid social. Social is the upper-funnel signal that explains why the lower-funnel channels move the way they do.
Promotions. Promo depth, cadence, duration, channel mix, and category overlap. Promotions are the single fastest CAC lever a competitor can pull, and the slowest one most teams notice. ShopVision tracks promotional intelligence across hundreds of thousands of brands, retailers, and marketplaces in real time.
The composite score weights these four together. The weights reflect what matters for ecommerce CAC, not what fits a B2B SaaS sales cycle.
How the score works
Click into any score and Competitive Pulse expands the panel. You see the underlying data, the time window, the weighting model, and the competitor set the score is computed against. Nothing is a black box. If a number changed, you can see what moved.
The score is computed against the competitors you pick. ShopVision can suggest competitors based on category, but the brand operator chooses the final set. If you compete with Allbirds and Vessi but not with Nike, Pulse should reflect that. The score updates as the data updates, not on a weekly snapshot.
We built it this way because the most common reason CMOs distrust dashboards is that they cannot see why the number changed. Pulse is designed to be auditable down to the source.
From score to action
Every score in Competitive Pulse generates a ranked list of actions. The top action is the one most likely to lower CAC if you ship it this week. The ranking is based on the gap between your performance and your chosen competitor set, weighted by how reachable the gap is in your current channel mix.
Click an action and the ShopVision Agent opens. You get a bespoke conversational analysis with the data already loaded. Ask it for a competitor email teardown, a ranked promo strategy, an ad-creative gap audit, or a brief for the agency. The Agent answers from the same dataset Pulse is scoring against, so the analysis stays consistent across the team.
This is the difference between a dashboard alert and a working tool. A dashboard says "your email score dropped." A working tool tells you which competitor pulled ahead, what they sent, why your audience opened it, and what to ship Wednesday to close the gap.
The Monday-to-Friday workflow
The workflow Competitive Pulse is built for is simple.
Monday morning. Open Pulse. Look at the composite score and the four sub-scores. Read the top three ranked actions. Pick one.
Monday afternoon. Click the action. The Agent runs the bespoke analysis. You forward the brief to the right team member, or you ship the change yourself.
Tuesday through Thursday. Execute. Send the email. Launch the ad. Adjust the promo. Reshare the social cut.
Friday. Open Pulse again. The number that mattered moved, or it did not. You know why.
The Sunday night decklift goes away. The Monday standup runs off the screen, not off the analyst's deck. The week's competitive narrative gets owned by the team, not by the tool that scraped the data.
What Competitive Pulse replaces
Most ecommerce teams today assemble competitive intelligence from a stack of tools. Each one solves a sliver of the problem. None of them score the four signals together. None of them are tuned for ecommerce CAC.
The table below maps the legacy stack to Competitive Pulse. Pricing reflects publicly listed plans where available, with quote-based plans noted.
The legacy options are good products. Most of them were built for a different buyer (B2B SaaS competitive intelligence, agency reporting) and a different problem (sales enablement, traffic source analysis). They each cover a slice of the ecommerce CAC question. Competitive Pulse is the screen that scores all four together, in the language of the ecommerce CMO.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ShopVision Competitive Pulse?
Competitive Pulse is a real-time competitive position score for ecommerce brands. It tracks email, ads, social, and promotions against the competitors you pick, surfaces your biggest opportunity, and ranks the actions most likely to lower CAC. It lives inside the ShopVision platform.
Who is Competitive Pulse for?
Ecommerce CMOs, heads of growth, brand leaders, and merchandising leaders at brands and retailers. The product was designed for teams who own customer acquisition cost and need a single view of competitive performance across the channels that drive it.
What does Competitive Pulse measure?
Four signals: email, ads, social, and promotions. Each one is scored against your chosen competitor set. The composite Pulse score is the weighted combination. Every score expands to the underlying data, time window, and weighting.
How is Competitive Pulse different from Crayon, Klue, or Kompyte?
Crayon, Klue, and Kompyte were built for B2B SaaS competitive intelligence, focused on sales battle cards and win-loss tracking. Competitive Pulse is built for ecommerce. The signals it measures (email cadence, ad spend, social engagement, promotional depth) are the channels that move ecommerce CAC. The buyer is the CMO, not the product marketing manager.
How is Competitive Pulse different from Similarweb?
Similarweb measures traffic, keywords, and audience overlap. Competitive Pulse measures the specific marketing actions that produce or prevent that traffic: what competitors are sending, spending, posting, and promoting. The two products answer different questions. Pulse tells you what to do this week. Similarweb tells you who showed up last month.
How does Competitive Pulse help lower CAC?
By giving teams the smallest possible loop between detection and action. The composite score shows where the gap is. The ranked action plan shows what to ship first. The Agent runs the analysis. Teams that close gaps faster spend less to acquire each customer. The product is designed to compress the Monday-to-Friday cycle from a manual analyst process into one screen.
How often does Competitive Pulse update?
Real-time. Data refreshes continuously as ShopVision tracks competitor activity across email, ads, social, and promotions. The Pulse score reflects the current state of the market, not a weekly snapshot.
Can I pick my own competitors?
Yes. ShopVision suggests competitors based on category, but you choose the final set. If you compete with one brand on email and a different brand on promo, Pulse can score against either or both.
Is Competitive Pulse a separate product or part of ShopVision?
It is included with ShopVision. Pulse is the dashboard layer. The full ShopVision platform includes the underlying intelligence modules (price, promo, assortment, MAP) and the Agent for conversational analysis.
Where Competitive Pulse fits in the ShopVision stack
Competitive Pulse is the entry point to ShopVision for the CMO and the head of growth. It sits above the rest of the platform, with the Intelligence Modules underneath:
- Promo Intelligence powers the promotions signal. It is also the first ShopVision MCP endpoint, available to plug into Claude or any MCP client.
- Pricing Intelligence powers the underlying competitive set selection and informs ad and promo benchmarking.
- Assortment Intelligence explains the category overlap that drives promo and email targeting.
- MAP Compliance sits adjacent for brands that need enforcement on the pricing side.
- The ShopVision Agent is the conversational layer that opens from any Pulse action.
The platform is designed to work as one. You can start with Pulse and pull in the deeper modules as needed, or you can use the modules directly through the platform or the MCP. The data is the same.
Stop guessing. Start knowing.
Competitive Pulse is live in ShopVision today.
If you are a CMO, head of growth, or brand leader who is tired of building Sunday-night decks to feel oriented on Monday, this is the screen we built for you. Open it Monday, pick the top action, see what moved by Friday.
Request a demo to see Competitive Pulse alongside the full ShopVision platform.
