Industry Analysis Template: Market Map, Metrics, Competitors, and Benchmarks

Why analysts need industry context

The same metric can mean different things in different industries. A marketplace cares about liquidity and matching efficiency. A subscription company cares about activation, retention, and churn. An ecommerce business cares about conversion, margin, repeat purchase, and return rate.

Industry analysis helps you avoid shallow benchmark comparisons and choose metrics that actually reflect the business model.

Copy this industry analysis template

Industry:
Customer groups:
Primary use cases:
Business models:
Value chain:
Revenue drivers:
Cost drivers:
Key metrics:
Competitor segments:
Benchmark sources:
Risks:
Strategic implication:

Map customers and use cases

Start by separating who pays, who uses the product, and what job the product helps them complete. In B2B, the buyer and user may be different. In marketplaces, the business may serve both supply and demand.

Define the value chain

The value chain tells you where data is generated and where decisions can create leverage.

Supplier -> Platform -> Customer -> Payment -> Fulfillment -> Support

For each step, ask: who controls the experience, which metric captures performance, and what operational constraint limits growth?

Choose industry-specific metrics

Ecommerce: conversion rate, average order value, repeat purchase, gross margin, return rate.
Marketplace: supply, demand, match rate, fill rate, take rate, liquidity, cancellation rate.
SaaS: activation, retention, churn, expansion revenue, trial conversion, support load.
Content: sessions, engaged time, returning users, ad RPM, subscriber conversion.
Fintech: activation, deposit conversion, transaction frequency, fraud rate, loss rate.

Build a competitor benchmark table

Do not copy competitor tactics without understanding business model differences. A competitor may have lower prices because it has a different cost structure, not because discounting is the right strategy.

company | segment | pricing model | acquisition channel | key metric | confidence
brand A | premium | subscription | content SEO | retention | medium
brand B | mass market | one-time purchase | paid social | conversion | low
brand C | marketplace | take rate | referral | liquidity | medium

Separate facts from assumptions

Public information is incomplete. Mark each benchmark with confidence level: high, medium, or low. High-confidence evidence may come from public filings or first-party data. Low-confidence evidence may come from visible website changes, ads, or rough traffic estimates.

Turn industry research into analysis

The final output should not be a long market overview. It should explain which metrics matter, what benchmarks are realistic, where the business may have an advantage, and which risks could change the metric trajectory.

Strategy implication template:
The industry competes mainly on [dimension].
The most important operating metric is [metric].
Our current risk is [risk].
The strongest opportunity is [opportunity].
Recommended analysis: [next metric or segment deep dive].