How to present competitor research people act on

Why good research gets ignored

The failure mode is familiar. Two days of careful competitor research goes into a spreadsheet: forty rows, six columns, colour coding. It gets posted in Slack with "thoughts welcome". Nobody replies. Three weeks later the decision it should have informed gets made in a meeting the spreadsheet never reached.

The research was not the problem. The format was. A spreadsheet asks the reader to do the work of finding the story, and busy people do not do that work. Senior people never do. Evidence that has not been arranged into an argument reads as notes, and notes are easy to postpone forever.

People do not act on findings. They act on an argument with evidence attached.

The deck format that gets acted on

One format survives contact with a meeting, a client call and a Slack thread alike: a short deck built from annotated screenshots. Four rules make it work.

• One screenshot per slide. The page is the evidence, so give it the whole slide. A collage of four thumbnails proves nothing because nobody can read any of them.
• The annotation sits on the image. A numbered pin on the exact element beats a paragraph on the next page. The eye lands on the point without searching for it.
• One takeaway line underneath. A single sentence stating what the slide proves. If you cannot write that sentence, the slide is not ready.
• Ten slides, not forty. Cutting is the analysis. A deck that shows everything argues nothing, and the room stops listening around slide twelve.

If you want the shape before you have the content, our free deck template is this format as a ten-slide PowerPoint skeleton, with the prompt for each slide already on it.

Slide by slide: a structure that holds

Order matters as much as content. Give the conclusion first, then the evidence, then the ask. A research deck is not a mystery novel, and nobody senior waits eight slides to find out why they are in the room.

Slides three to seven carry the argument, so be strict about what gets in. Every evidence slide must survive the question "what does this prove?". If the honest answer is "it is interesting", cut it. Choosing which pages to study in the first place is covered in the competitor teardown guide.

Show the desktop and phone mismatch

Most audiences have never seen a rival's page at desktop and phone width side by side. The two often disagree: the phone version cuts a section, shortens the headline or swaps the call to action. Half of most sites' visitors only ever see the phone version, so the mismatch is a finding in its own right, and it photographs well. Capture both widths for every page you study, and give the sharpest disagreement its own slide.

Presenting live versus sending it on

Live, you are the narrator. You control the pace, zoom into a pin when a question lands, and make the ask in person. Keep on-slide text sparse, because you will say the rest. The deck is scaffolding for a conversation.

Sent on, the deck speaks alone, so the takeaway lines carry more weight. Write them as full claims, not fragments: "Pricing is one click from every page" survives a cold read, "pricing nav" does not. A PDF attachment works. A read-only link often works better, because it opens in the browser with nothing to download. Stravue share links open with every pin intact and need no signup to view, which matters when the reader is a client who will not create an account to read your work.

Tailoring the deck to the room

• Executives want the answer, the risk and the cost. Lead with slide two, keep evidence to the three strongest slides, and hold the rest in an appendix for questions.
• Design and product teams want the detail. Keep every evidence slide, add the flows behind them, and expect the meeting to happen inside the screenshots.
• Clients want rigour they could not have produced themselves. Keep the full structure, put the agency's logo on the export, and close with moves priced as work. The agency competitor deck shows the shape.

Same evidence, three different decks. Because the captures and pins do not change, retargeting a deck for a new room is an hour of editing, not a rebuild. A multi-site pricing sweep shows one evidence set serving several audiences.

How Stravue turns captures into the deck

Stravue handles the mechanical half of this job. Capture the pages clean, full-page, on desktop and phone, with cookie banners and chat widgets removed. Pin numbered annotations straight onto the captures. Then export in whichever form the room needs: PowerPoint (.pptx) for a deck you will edit and present, PDF for a fixed record, clean PNGs when the slides live in another tool, or a read-only share link that needs no signup to view. Pins travel with every format. On the Studio and Agency plans, exports carry your own logo. Plans start at $39 or £29 a month, cancel anytime; see pricing.

Keep the deck alive after the meeting

A competitor deck ages the day a rival ships a change. If the research earned a decision, it is worth knowing when the evidence moves. Watching competitor pages gives you dated before and after captures when something real changes, so the next version of the deck starts itself.

Frequently asked questions