A aggressive PPC (Pay Per Click on) evaluation is all about seeing what your opponents are doing with their paid adverts on platforms like Google Adverts, so you are able to do it higher. It helps you uncover which key phrases they’re spending cash on, what their adverts and touchdown pages appear to be, and the way a lot finances they could be working with.
If you happen to can’t afford to spend per week on a handbook evaluation otherwise you doubt you might have sufficient expertise to do it properly, your subsequent best choice is a big language mannequin (LLM) like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. All you have to know is the place to search for PPC information and a very good immediate—that is what I’m going that can assist you with.
Listed below are a number of examples from a completed undertaking I’ve already created utilizing this technique.
The primary instance is an govt abstract, offering a short overview of the evaluation.
And right here, ChatGPT performs key phrase overlap and key phrase hole analyses. You can even obtain the whole leads to CSV format.
My PPC evaluation plan combines Ahrefs and ChatGPT to provide you a full image view of your opponents’ promoting technique in Google Adverts, and assist you rapidly enhance your personal.
With Ahrefs, you’ll see precisely which key phrases your opponents are bidding on, the nations they’re concentrating on, and what adverts and touchdown pages they use—one thing you may’t do with Google Key phrase Planner.
You’ll additionally obtain estimated day by day, weekly, and month-to-month advert spending to gauge their aggressiveness and spot patterns.
Then, ChatGPT steps in to determine key phrase gaps (key phrases they bid on however you don’t), pull out key insights from the info, and recommend simple wins you may act on quick. After the evaluation, you may even ask it to construct out a full PPC motion plan, together with suggestions for touchdown pages and higher advert copy to spice up your efficiency.
Let’s get began!
On this step, we’ll determine what to incorporate within the aggressive evaluation, collect information about your opponents’ paid visitors, and discover notable tendencies of their spending habits.
First, make a listing of your opponents’ websites. To be sure to’re not lacking out on any, you may test the Natural opponents report in Web site Audit. Likelihood is that the websites that need to outrank additionally, you will bid on the identical key phrases in Google Adverts.
Now, plug in your competitor domains together with yours into Batch Evaluation. Export the outcomes.
To grasp how your opponents use their Google Adverts budgets, test the Paid search tab within the Overview report. Search for any spending patterns or methods that stand out. I like to recommend doing this step manually moderately than counting on AI, since people are naturally good at recognizing patterns, and AI generally struggles with studying information from pictures with graphs.
For instance, this information on common natural visitors spend from Monday, we see their present estimated spend is about $243k—round 5 instances decrease than their peak spend in August 2024. Final yr, their month-to-month spend by no means dropped beneath $110k, with clear spikes towards the top of the yr. Based mostly on this, you may anticipate them to extend their bids considerably from August to December 2025.
You possibly can jot down your observations as you go and ask ChatGPT so as to add them to the report later.
On this step, we’ll have a look at which key phrases your opponents are bidding on, what their advert copy seems like, and which touchdown pages they’re utilizing.
To get all this information, go to the Paid key phrases report in Web site Explorer and Export your entire Paid key phrases and Adverts reviews.
Repeat for every competitor and every nation you need to compete in.
If you happen to’re already operating search adverts, this step will assist you see the way you stack up in opposition to your opponents.
To assemble the info, you should utilize the identical Ahrefs reviews you used in your opponents, export your key phrase checklist from Google Adverts, or use some other checklist you’d like to match.
On this step, we’ll get opponents’ PPC touchdown pages prepared for AI evaluation. From expertise, AI does an ideal job of determining the technique behind a touchdown web page in the event you give it an simply “digestible” file, corresponding to a PDF.
First, we have to determine the fitting pages. Many corporations ship paid visitors to straightforward pages like their homepage or product tour, however essentially the most revealing insights often come from touchdown pages created particularly for PPC.
To search out these, test the Paid pages report in Web site Explorer and search for clues within the URLs—phrases like “lp,” “touchdown,” random strings of letters and numbers, or URLs with UTM tags typically level to PPC-focused pages.
Go to these URLs and save them as PDFs (in Chrome or Firefox, go to File > Print and select Save as PDF because the vacation spot). You don’t want to incorporate each web page—simply select a stable pattern that provides you a transparent image.
While you’re engaged on one thing complicated like PPC aggressive evaluation, establishing a undertaking in ChatGPT or Claude offers you and your AI assistant a shared, organized workspace. Utilizing the identical set of supply information all through helps hold every thing constant. So, while you reference a file in chat, the AI is aware of precisely the place to get the context or the place to make updates.
That is the ultimate step of the evaluation. From right here, AI will take over and generate the report for you. All you have to do is ready up a undertaking, add the information you’ve gathered, and paste the immediate from this file into the chat window. Ensure that to make use of essentially the most superior mannequin out there to you (for me, that’s o3).
Because the immediate is kind of lengthy, I’ll present it in this file.
Be happy to ask your LLM any follow-up questions after the evaluation is accomplished.
On the time of writing, the undertaking characteristic isn’t supported in Gemini, but when that’s your favourite LLM, attempt importing the file within the chat window or making a Gem.
Analyzing your opponents’ Google Adverts methods is easy with a device like Ahrefs. In my expertise, different PPC promoting platforms don’t provide the identical stage of perception.
For social media adverts, you should utilize the official advert libraries from Meta, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn (you’ll have to lookup each model individually). Relying on the platform, you’ll be capable of see issues just like the advert inventive, totally different variations of the advert, attain (for EU audiences), concentrating on particulars, and when the adverts ran.
Advert libraries received’t provide a lot competitor information, however you may nonetheless use AI to search out patterns amongst advert creatives. Once more, the trick is to save lots of any net web page displaying competitor adverts in PDF format and provides it to an LLM asking issues like:
- What do these adverts promote?
- Group each advert by dominant visible theme (human faces, product UI, icon‑solely, illustration, and so forth.).
- Record the point of interest of every inventive (face, emblem, textual content‑first, CTA button) and rank them by prevalence.
- Extract each headline and overlay textual content. Cluster them by copy angle (profit, worry of lacking out, time financial savings, social proof). Which angle is dominant?
- Determine recurring design motifs.
For different show networks, instruments like AdBeat or AdClarity could be useful. For instance, AdBeat offers you a fast overview of your competitor’s PPC exercise—displaying you the forms of adverts they run most frequently, which publishers they work with, and even letting you view their advert creatives.
Remaining ideas
As a result of LLMs can rerun analyses in seconds, you might have the liberty to experiment wildly. Need to take a look at if competitor headlines utilizing emotional triggers outperform product-focused copy? Simply ask. Curious how seasonality impacts their key phrase technique? Rerun your evaluation with a contemporary immediate.
So go forward: throw unconventional concepts on the mannequin, iterate quickly, and uncover alternatives you’d by no means uncover slogging by means of spreadsheets manually.
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