# Competitive Insights

Your own metrics say how your email program is doing; they say nothing about the senders competing for the same inboxes. The [**Competitive Insights**](https://bird.com/dashboard/w/email/competitive) page benchmarks your program against theirs: the send volume, cadence, inbox placement, read rates, and campaigns a measurement panel observes other brands sending, side by side with your own Bird-measured figures.

Open **Email** > **Competitive Insights** in the dashboard. The **Overview** tab holds your watchlist, and the **Compare** tab puts up to five watched brands head to head with you. Selecting any watched brand opens its profile.

## Build your watchlist

Select **Add competitor** and search by brand name or sending domain. Adding a brand tracks its highest-volume sending domain, and every figure the brand shows is measured on that domain. A brand that splits mail across several domains is understated by whatever the other domains carry.

Your organization can watch 10 brands by default, counted across all of its workspaces, and the limit is adjustable. Removing a brand frees its slot immediately.

## Read the overview

The range picker offers **Last 7 days**, **Last 30 days**, and **Last 90 days**, and defaults to 30. The cards above the table summarize the period: competitor send volume, your inbox placement, and your send cadence against the peer median, plus your share of volume across you and every brand you watch.

![The Competitive Insights Overview tab: the range picker and Add competitor button, then Notable campaigns with one creative card per watched brand, badged Biggest send or Landing in spam](/images/docs/dashboard-email-competitive-overview.png)

Each watchlist row carries the same set of figures:

- **Est. sends**: everything the brand sent in the period, inbox and spam together. The panel projects this from a sample of real mailboxes, so treat it as an estimate with coarse precision, especially for small senders.
- **Cadence / week**: campaigns sent per week from the tracked domain.
- **Inbox placement**: the share of observed mail that reached an inbox rather than spam.
- **Est. read rate**: the share of the brand's delivered mail that was read, as the panel measures reading. This is a panel estimate and not comparable to your Bird-measured open rate, which counts differently.
- **Audience overlap**: the share of your own audience the panel also sees receiving this brand's mail. Overlap is measured per domain pair and is often unmeasured, which shows as a dash rather than a zero.
- **Last campaign**: the newest campaign the panel captured, with its creative when one was captured.

The **You** row runs your own top-volume sending domain through the same lens. Send volume and cadence on that row are measured from your actual sending; placement and read rate are panel estimates like every other row, and each figure is labeled with which it is. Your row shows no audience overlap, because overlap is measured against your domain.

![The watchlist table: a You row for send.goldcrest.dev above four watched brands, with estimated sends and their change, cadence per week, inbox placement bars, estimated read rate, audience overlap, and the last campaign with its date](/images/docs/dashboard-email-competitive-watchlist.png)

Below the table, **Notable campaigns** surfaces sends that stood out across the brands you watch, such as a brand sending at a multiple of its usual volume or a campaign filing as spam at a provider. **Latest sends** shows the newest emails captured across your watchlist, and **Send volume over time** plots daily volume for the watched brands and you.

## Brand profiles

Selecting a brand opens its profile: the same headline figures, the ESP it sends through when the panel knows it, and three deeper panels.

![A brand profile: the sending domain, ESP, and industry line, four cards for estimated sends, send cadence, inbox placement, and estimated read rate, then the Send-time pattern with its busiest hour and the Placement by mailbox provider table](/images/docs/dashboard-email-competitive-brand.png)

**Placement by mailbox provider** breaks the brand's inbox and spam rates down per provider, with a **vs. you** column against your own placement at the same provider. Rows cover whichever providers the panel observed for the brand; Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, and Comcast are the ones it reports most often.

**Campaign feed** lists what the panel saw the brand send, newest first: subject lines, captured creatives, read and spam rates per campaign, and the share of campaigns that led with a discount. Not every campaign gets a creative; the panel captures images for only some of what it observes. Selecting a campaign opens its detail: estimated reach, read rate, inbox and spam rates, and the captured creative at full size when one exists.

![The Campaign feed on a brand profile: a grid of captured creatives, each with its subject line, send date, read rate, and estimated reach, and a count of how many campaigns led with a discount](/images/docs/dashboard-email-competitive-brand-feed.png)

**Send-time pattern** maps the brand's sending across weekday and hour of day in your timezone, with the busiest hour called out. This grid always covers the last 90 days, whatever the range picker says, and can lag the figures beside it by up to a day.

## Compare brands head to head

The **Compare** tab charts you and up to five watched brands, one color per brand, across estimated sends, inbox placement, send cadence, and estimated read rate for the selected period. Use it when the question is a ranking rather than one brand's behavior.

![The Compare tab head to head: You and four watched brands as coloured bars for estimated sends, send cadence, and inbox placement, scaled within each metric](/images/docs/dashboard-email-competitive-compare.png)

## How the numbers are measured

Every competitor figure is a panel estimate, observed from a sample of real mailboxes and projected, and every figure is fetched live when the page loads rather than from a stored copy. Numbers can shift slightly between loads as the panel's sample moves, and a brand the panel barely observes carries wide error bars however precise the digits look.

## When figures are missing

- **Not tracked by the panel**: the domain is too small or too new for the panel to observe. Watching it costs a slot, and no figures appear until the panel picks it up.
- **No mail seen in this period**: the panel tracks the domain but observed nothing in the range you picked.
- **Figures unavailable right now**: the panel was unreachable when the page loaded. Your watchlist itself is unaffected; retry.

## Next steps

- [Inbox Insights](/docs/guides/email/inbox-insights): the same placement measurement pointed at your own domains
- [Email metrics](/docs/guides/email/tracking-and-metrics): your own delivery and engagement figures
- [Broadcasts](/docs/guides/email/broadcasts): the campaigns on your side of the comparison