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 funds they is likely to be working with.
For those who can’t afford to spend every week on a guide evaluation otherwise you doubt you’ve got sufficient expertise to do it effectively, your subsequent best choice is a big language mannequin (LLM) like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. All it’s essential to know is the place to search for PPC information and a superb immediate—that is what I’m going that can assist you with.
Listed here are just a few examples from a completed mission I’ve already created utilizing this methodology.
The primary instance is an government abstract, offering a short overview of the evaluation.
And right here, ChatGPT performs key phrase overlap and key phrase hole analyses. You can too obtain the whole ends in 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 enable you to shortly 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’ll be able to’t do with Google Key phrase Planner.
You’ll additionally obtain estimated every 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’ll be able to act on quick. After the evaluation, you’ll be able to 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 developments of their spending habits.
First, make a listing of your opponents’ websites. To ensure you’re not lacking out on any, you’ll be able to 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 slightly than counting on AI, since people are naturally good at recognizing patterns, and AI typically struggles with studying information from photographs with graphs.
For instance, this information on common natural visitors spend from Monday, we see their present estimated spend is about $243k—round 5 occasions 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. Based mostly on this, you’ll be able to count on them to extend their bids considerably from August to December 2025.
You’ll be able to 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 appears to be like 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 the whole Paid key phrases and Adverts experiences.
Repeat for every competitor and every nation you need to compete in.
For those who’re already working search adverts, this step will enable you to see the way you stack up towards your opponents.
To collect the info, you should use the identical Ahrefs experiences you used to your opponents, export your key phrase record from Google Adverts, or use every other record you’d like to match.
On this step, we’ll get opponents’ PPC touchdown pages prepared for AI evaluation. From expertise, AI does a fantastic job of determining the technique behind a touchdown web page in the event you give it an simply “digestible” file, equivalent 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 probably the most revealing insights normally come from touchdown pages created particularly for PPC.
To seek 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 offers you a transparent image.
Whenever you’re engaged on one thing advanced like PPC aggressive evaluation, organising a mission in ChatGPT or Claude offers you and your AI assistant a shared, organized workspace. Utilizing the identical set of supply recordsdata all through helps hold the whole lot 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’s essential to do is ready up a mission, add the recordsdata you’ve gathered, and paste the immediate from this file into the chat window. Be sure that to make use of probably the most superior mannequin out there to you (for me, that’s o3).
Because the immediate is sort of lengthy, I’ll present it in this file.
Be happy to ask your LLM any follow-up questions after the evaluation is performed.
On the time of writing, the mission characteristic isn’t supported in Gemini, but when that’s your favourite LLM, strive 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 use 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 to 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 gained’t provide a lot competitor information, however you’ll be able to nonetheless use AI to seek out patterns amongst advert creatives. Once more, the trick is to avoid wasting any net web page exhibiting 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 many others.).
- Checklist the focus 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?
- Establish 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—exhibiting you the sorts of adverts they run most frequently, which publishers they work with, and even letting you view their advert creatives.
Closing ideas
As a result of LLMs can rerun analyses in seconds, you’ve got 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 via spreadsheets manually.
Obtained questions or feedback? Discover me on LinkedIn.
