A aggressive PPC (Pay Per Click on) evaluation is all about seeing what your rivals are doing with their paid advertisements 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 advertisements and touchdown pages seem like, and the way a lot price range they is likely to be working with.
Should you can’t afford to spend every week on a handbook evaluation otherwise you doubt you might have sufficient expertise to do it nicely, your subsequent most suitable choice is a big language mannequin (LLM) like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. All it is advisable to know is the place to search for PPC knowledge and a great immediate—that is what I’m going that can assist you with.
Listed here are a couple of examples from a completed mission I’ve already created utilizing this technique.
The primary instance is an govt abstract, offering a quick overview of the evaluation.
And right here, ChatGPT performs key phrase overlap and key phrase hole analyses. It’s also possible to obtain the whole leads to CSV format.
My PPC evaluation plan combines Ahrefs and ChatGPT to provide you a full image view of your rivals’ promoting technique in Google Adverts, and enable you to shortly enhance your personal.
With Ahrefs, you’ll see precisely which key phrases your rivals are bidding on, the nations they’re focusing on, and what advertisements 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 counsel straightforward 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 resolve what to incorporate within the aggressive evaluation, collect knowledge about your rivals’ paid visitors, and discover notable tendencies of their spending habits.
First, make an inventory of your rivals’ websites. To ensure you’re not lacking out on any, you may verify the Natural rivals report in Web site Audit. Chances are high that the websites that wish 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 know how your rivals use their Google Adverts budgets, verify 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 fairly than counting on AI, since people are naturally good at recognizing patterns, and AI typically struggles with studying knowledge from photographs with graphs.
For instance, taking a look at this knowledge 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 12 months, their month-to-month spend by no means dropped beneath $110k, with clear spikes towards the top of the 12 months. Primarily based on this, you may count on 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 rivals are bidding on, what their advert copy seems like, and which touchdown pages they’re utilizing.
To get all this knowledge, go to the Paid key phrases report in Web site Explorer and Export the whole Paid key phrases and Adverts experiences.
Repeat for every competitor and every nation you wish to compete in.
Should you’re already operating search advertisements, this step will enable you to see the way you stack up in opposition to your rivals.
To assemble the info, you need to use the identical Ahrefs experiences you used in your rivals, export your key phrase checklist from Google Adverts, or use some other checklist you’d like to match.
On this step, we’ll get rivals’ PPC touchdown pages prepared for AI evaluation. From expertise, AI does a terrific job of determining the technique behind a touchdown web page when you give it an simply “digestible” file, equivalent to a PDF.
First, we have to determine the suitable pages. Many firms ship paid visitors to straightforward pages like their homepage or product tour, however probably the most revealing insights often come from touchdown pages created particularly for PPC.
To seek out these, verify 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 usually 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 offers you a transparent image.
Whenever you’re engaged on one thing complicated like PPC aggressive evaluation, establishing a mission in ChatGPT or Claude provides you and your AI assistant a shared, organized workspace. Utilizing the identical set of supply recordsdata all through helps maintain every little thing constant. So, whenever 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 it is advisable to do is about up a mission, add the recordsdata you’ve gathered, and paste the immediate from this file into the chat window. Ensure that to make use of probably the most superior mannequin obtainable to you (for me, that’s o3).
For the reason that 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 mission 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 rivals’ Google Adverts methods is easy with a instrument like Ahrefs. In my expertise, different PPC promoting platforms don’t provide the identical stage of perception.
For social media advertisements, you need to use the official advert libraries from Meta, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn (you’ll must lookup each model individually). Relying on the platform, you’ll be capable to see issues just like the advert artistic, totally different variations of the advert, attain (for EU audiences), focusing on particulars, and when the advertisements ran.
Advert libraries received’t provide a lot competitor knowledge, however you may nonetheless use AI to search out patterns amongst advert creatives. Once more, the trick is to avoid wasting any internet web page exhibiting competitor advertisements in PDF format and provides it to an LLM asking issues like:
- What do these advertisements promote?
- Group each advert by dominant visible theme (human faces, product UI, icon‑solely, illustration, and so forth.).
- Listing the focus of every artistic (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 may be useful. For instance, AdBeat provides you a fast overview of your competitor’s PPC exercise—exhibiting you the forms of advertisements they run most frequently, which publishers they work with, and even letting you view their advert creatives.
Last ideas
As a result of LLMs can rerun analyses in seconds, you might have the liberty to experiment wildly. Wish 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 via spreadsheets manually.
Bought questions or feedback? Discover me on LinkedIn.
