Four steps. Five minutes. Complete competitive intelligence.
Go to facebook.com/ads/library. Set the country (usually United States) and category to "All ads."
Search by competitor name. If you don't know who they are, ask your client for their top 3-5. Or search the niche + city — "Dentist Tampa" shows every dental practice running ads in Tampa.
Mix of different competitors. Screenshot them, copy the text, or save the shareable link from the library. Get a variety — images, videos, carousels.
Screenshot will be added here
💡 Pro tip: Ads running for 3+ months are probably profitable. Nobody keeps spending money on ads that don't work. Study those the closest.
When reviewing competitor ads, pay attention to these six things:
60+ days = probably working. Just started = they're testing. Long-running ads are the ones to study.
The first line of text or first second of video. What are they leading with?
Free consultation? Discount? Free trial? Limited time? What's the carrot?
Image, video, carousel? What's the visual showing? Professional photos or UGC?
Book now, learn more, call now, shop now? Where are they sending people?
Click through if you can. See where they're sending traffic. Form? Calendar? Phone number?
Drop your screenshots or paste the ad copy into Claude Code and use this prompt:
i'm analyzing competitor ads for a [NICHE] client in [CITY]. here are [X] ads from their competitors. analyze each one and give me: 1. what hook they're using and why it might work 2. what offer they're making 3. who they're probably targeting 4. what emotional trigger they're using (fear, desire, social proof, urgency, curiosity) 5. what's weak about this ad 6. what angle they're NOT covering that we could use then at the end, give me: - the top 3 patterns you see across all these ads - 3 gaps that none of them are covering - 5 ad angles we should test that would stand out from all of these
Paste the ad copy below the prompt. Or reference the screenshots if you dropped them in your project folder.
Screenshot will be added here
Here's the kind of output you'll get:
Competitor A — SmileBright Dental
Leading with a fear hook — "Don't let dental problems get worse." Offering free exam + X-ray for new patients. Targeting adults 25-55 who've been avoiding the dentist. Using a stock photo of a smiling woman. Weak point: the hook is generic, the image looks like every other dental ad, and they bury the offer in paragraph 3.
Gap Found:
None of these competitors are showing the actual experience of visiting the practice. No behind-the-scenes, no doctor introductions, no "here's what your first visit actually looks like" content.
Recommended Angles:
1. "First visit" walkthrough that removes fear
2. Staff intro / personality-driven content
3. Price transparency ("here's what a cleaning actually costs")
You now have a competitive strategy in 5 minutes. Use the gaps and angles to write your client's ads.
💡 Save it. Store the analysis in clients/[client]/competitor-analysis.md so you can reference it when building campaigns and track changes over time.
Don't do this once and forget about it. Competitors change their ads, new ones show up, old ones disappear. Run this prompt once a month:
i'm doing a monthly competitor check for [CLIENT NAME]. check the meta ad library for these competitors: [LIST NAMES] compare what they're running now vs what we saw last month (see clients/[client]/competitor-analysis.md for the previous analysis). tell me: - what's new - what they stopped running (probably wasn't working) - any new angles or offers we should be aware of - anything we should adjust in our own strategy based on this
⚠️ Set a calendar reminder. First Monday of every month. "Competitor check for [client]." If you're not monitoring, you're flying blind while competitors evolve around you.
Ask your client for their top 3-5 competitors. Or search the niche + city in the Ad Library.
Screenshot or copy 5-10 active ads from the Meta Ad Library. Mix of competitors and formats.
Drop everything into Claude Code with the analysis prompt above. Get patterns, gaps, and angles.
Use the gaps and recommended angles to write your client's ads. You're not copying — you're finding what's missing.
Store in clients/[client]/competitor-analysis.md. Re-run monthly.
Once you've got the basics down, level up with these:
Your client's local competitors might all run the same boring ads. But a dentist in Miami might have a killer angle nobody in Tampa has seen. Steal ideas from other markets before they spread.
National brands spend millions on testing. Search the big names in your client's niche. If a national chain has been running the same ad for 6 months, that angle works. Adapt it locally.
Start a simple spreadsheet: competitor name, ad start date, still running yes/no. After a few months you'll see exactly which ad styles have staying power in your niche. That data is gold.
💡 Combine with Lead Scraping. Use the prospecting data from Lesson 5.9 to identify which competitors are running ads, then analyze those ads here. The two workflows feed each other.
🛑 Don't copy competitor ads. You're looking for patterns and gaps, not copy-paste material. If you run the same ad as a competitor, you're just adding noise. The whole point is to find what they're NOT doing.
🛑 Don't skip the analysis. Screenshotting 10 ads and never looking at them again is a waste of time. The value is in the Claude analysis — patterns, gaps, angles.
⚠️ Don't only look at your city. Local competitors often copy each other. Look at 2-3 other cities in the same niche for fresh angles that haven't saturated your market.