Competitor Creative Audit Playbook
The deep competitor analysis and creative audit we run on 3 to 5 brands before every paid-ads engagement.
Get the full Competitor Creative Audit playbook
Enter your email. We'll send you the link instantly. Point your Claude Code at it and run the full audit in 20 to 40 minutes.
- What it does: tear down 3 to 5 named competitors across Meta Ad Library, Google paid SERPs, and social content. Classify every hook and angle. Hand back 10 to 15 ranked ad briefs the creative team can ship next week.
- Output: one consolidated Word doc plus markdown source in your GitHub repo. Ten sections plus Executive Summary, Cross-cutting Themes, Top 10 to 15 Ranked Ad Angles, and a 30-60-90 test plan.
- Runs in: 30 to 60 minutes inside Claude Code.
- You need: Claude Code, a short CLAUDE.md describing your business, competitor names plus their Facebook page handles, and pandoc for the Word doc export.
- For: founder-led premium DTC brands, AOV $500 or two times category median, paid-ads-active or preparing to launch.
- Cost: free. Your only spend is the API credits your own accounts consume (usually under $10 per run).
- Built by: Nishant Kapoor. Chartered Accountant (EY), INSEAD MBA, ten years operating DTC brands. Scale stories include Suttons & Robertson £1.5M to £5M, consumer wearable $0 to $3.5M, London luxury ecommerce £2M to £6M.
What this playbook does
Premium DTC brands burn through ad creative fast. The founder knows a handful of competitors by name but never has a clean, ranked view of what those competitors are actually running, what is working, and where the whitespace sits. Weeks of manual Meta Ad Library scrolling, screenshotting, and theming produce a swipe file that is stale by the time it lands. Creative teams ship on gut feel. Paid ads fatigue. CTR drops. Nobody can point to the lever that fixes it.
This playbook replaces that with a single Claude Code session. It runs a 30-day Meta Ad Library scan per competitor (hooks, formats, creative styles, ad copy patterns, fatigue signals), a Google Ads paid-SERP scan across brand and category queries, a social-content audit across LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and TikTok, a hook and angle taxonomy that clusters every observed pattern into a single frequency table, a production-style audit, a CTA pattern analysis, and a whitespace map that names the angles no competitor is running. The output is 10 to 15 ranked ad angles with starter briefs. Ads your creative team can shoot next week.
What you get
Ten deliverables, built to hand straight to a creative team.
- Product positioning + target audience. Top products, positioning summary, assumed ICP for 3 to 5 brands.
- Active creative + fatigue signals. 30-day Meta Ad Library scan per competitor: hooks, formats, copy, estimated reach, fatigue signals.
- Paid search copy + sitelinks. Google SERP scan across brand query, category head term, and 5 commercial-intent terms.
- Top posts + engagement patterns. LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok social-content audit over a 30-day window.
- Categorised angle families. Hook taxonomy across social proof, urgency, identity, authority, contrarian, transformation.
- UGC vs studio vs founder-voice mix. Who is using what, format mix, production feasibility for your brand.
- Dominant CTAs + conversion framing. Shop Now, Learn More, Download, Subscribe, frequency across every surface.
- Angles nobody in the category runs. Whitespace map naming the hooks the ICP wants that no competitor delivers.
- 10 to 15 ready-to-shoot ad briefs. Ranked by ICE. Hook, script, format, copy, CTA, offer, KPI band per angle.
- Angle patterns + whitespace opportunities. Cross-competitor synthesis. Correlated hooks across 3 to 5 brands, the top 10 to 15 starter briefs pulled from the synthesis. The deliverable most ad spy tools skip.
Delivered as one Word doc plus the markdown source and supporting competitor-screenshots folder in your GitHub repo.
How the playbook flexes
The audit adapts to scope. Four modes cover the common briefs.
- Full. 3 to 5 competitors, all sections. Standard engagement. The complete teardown plus the synthesis pass plus 10 to 15 starter briefs. Runs 45 to 60 minutes.
- Quick. 1 competitor, Meta Ad Library and hook taxonomy only. Sprint-sized. Used when one competitor dominates the category or the founder flagged one brand by name. Runs in under 20 minutes.
- Pre-launch. Category-level landscape across 5 or more competitors, shallow per brand. Heavy whitespace mapping for new brands with no paid history.
- Focused. 1 competitor, deep teardown. Used when a competitor is gaining share fast and the founder needs to understand exactly how before countering.
Tools the audit uses
Public data, through our own accounts.
- Meta Ad Library for the 30-day snapshot of active competitor ads (free, public, no API key required)
- Serper for paid-SERP copy across brand, category, and commercial tail queries
- WebFetch and WebSearch for competitor homepages, PDPs, About pages, and public social profiles
- Google and Bing SERPs for the paid and organic backdrop around each brand
- Apify (optional) for TikTok and Instagram scraping where WebFetch hits JS-rendered pages
- Keywords Everywhere for volume checks on ad headlines that look like head-term plays
Your own data, once access is shared.
- Meta Ads API for creative fatigue scoring on your own account, benchmarked against competitor rotation cadence
- Google Ads for Quality Score diagnostics, auction insights (who you compete with in the auction), and branded-search defence review
- Ahrefs for domain-level paid-keyword history and competitor Ads History across 24 months
Internal-layer sections stub honestly when access is not yet granted. The report renders with a clear "requires access" flag and the exact grant steps, so you see what unlocks and why. No fabricated data, ever.
The synthesis pass: what makes this different
Most ad spy tools hand back a directory of screenshots. You scroll for hours, save favourites, and hope a pattern shows up. This playbook runs a dedicated synthesis pass after every section has been drafted. Claude re-reads the complete audit end-to-end, clusters every observed hook into angle families, ranks each angle by estimated category fit plus whitespace signal plus production feasibility, then writes 10 to 15 starter ad briefs your creative team can take straight into a shoot next week. The synthesis pass is the difference between a swipe file you archive and a shot list you ship.
Ready to tear down your competitors' creative?
Enter your email. We'll send you the Google Doc link. Paste it into Claude Code and you'll have a ranked swipe file in 30 to 60 minutes.
Questions we get asked
What is a competitor creative audit?
A competitor creative audit is a structured teardown of 3 to 5 named competitor DTC brands across every visible creative surface: Meta Ad Library, Google paid SERPs, and social content on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and TikTok. Every observed hook, angle, format, production style, and CTA is classified into a taxonomy, counted, and compared. The output is a ranked shortlist of 10 to 15 ad angles your creative team can steal, beat, or own.
Is this free?
Yes. The playbook is free. Your only spend is the API credits your own accounts consume during a run, typically under $10 for a Full-mode audit covering 3 to 5 competitors. No account required with us, no booking needed, no follow-up sales call unless you want one.
Does this include TikTok and Instagram content?
Yes. The social-content audit covers LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and TikTok. For each platform per competitor the audit pulls posting cadence over the last 30 days, a content-theme breakdown, and the top 5 posts by engagement with hook line and post type. Where WebFetch hits login-wall HTML on Instagram or TikTok, the audit falls back to Apify scrapers if you have an Apify account, or flags the gap for a manual screenshot pass.
How is this different from a competitor analysis?
A competitor analysis typically covers positioning, product, pricing, SWOT, and market share. A competitor creative audit is narrower and deeper: every active ad, every top social post, every paid-SERP headline classified into a hook and angle taxonomy with a ranked whitespace map. The creative audit assumes you already know who your competitors are and what they sell. It answers a sharper question: what creative angles are they running right now, and which angles can we own?
How many competitors can I include?
Full mode covers 3 to 5 competitors with a deep teardown on each. Pre-launch mode goes wider (5 or more) and shallower, useful when a new brand is mapping the category landscape. Focused mode zooms into a single competitor gaining share fast. Quick mode also covers a single competitor but with a tighter scope, Meta Ad Library and hooks only. You pick the mode when you kick off the run.
What if my competitor doesn't run Meta ads?
The audit adapts. If Meta Ad Library returns zero active ads for a competitor, Section 2 flags the fact clearly and redistributes weight to Sections 3 (Google Ads SERP scan) and 4 (social content audit). Brands that lean into organic social, PR, or Google paid search still leave a rich creative footprint. The hook and angle taxonomy aggregates across every surface, so a competitor with no Meta ads still populates the whitespace map through their LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok footprint.
Who built this playbook?
Nishant Kapoor, founder of EntireCommerce AI. Chartered Accountant (EY), INSEAD MBA, ten-year DTC operator. Scale stories include Suttons & Robertson £1.5M to £5M in three years, a consumer wearable $0 to $3.5M in eighteen months, London luxury ecommerce £2M to £6M in two years, and consumer electronics $0 to $5M in two years.
How does this compare to SpyFu or Minea?
SpyFu and Minea are ad spy tools: subscription dashboards that catalogue competitor ads and let you filter, sort, and save. They are directories of screenshots. This playbook is a synthesis layer on top of the same raw data. Claude reads every active ad plus every top social post, clusters observations into a hook and angle taxonomy, names the whitespace, and writes 10 to 15 ranked starter briefs with copy drafts, CTA, offer, and KPI bands. You get a production-ready shot list. The tools and the playbook work well side by side if you already subscribe.
How often should I re-run the audit?
Every 90 days for ongoing paid-ads clients. Creative rotates fast in DTC. A swipe file older than a quarter misleads the creative team toward patterns competitors already retired. Re-running quarterly keeps the whitespace map accurate and surfaces new angles before they become category defaults. Run the audit also before any major category launch or when your own CTR drops 20% month over month and the team needs fresh angles fast.
Your playbook is ready
Three files. Pick your delivery mode below. Drop them into your Claude Code project. Run the audit on your brand in 30 to 60 minutes.
Copy the link. Paste into Claude Code with "read this and run it." Zero setup.
Clone or fork into your project. Standard git workflow.
Open the Google Doc above. Copy its URL. Paste it into Claude Code with:
"Read this and take me through it step by step."
Claude handles everything else. Interviews you for the competitor list and your business context. Walks you through any missing API setup live. Runs the full audit. You don't need to manage files or copy prompt content manually.
Prefer to do it manually? Run it in three steps
- Get the files. Open either the Google Doc or the GitHub repo above. Both contain the same three files:
README.md(setup and run instructions),CLAUDE.md(business-briefing template), andcompetitor-creative-audit.md(the master prompt Claude runs). - Drop them into your Claude project. Copy the three files into a new folder on your machine. Open Claude Code inside that folder. Fill in the
CLAUDE.mdtemplate with your business details: product, audience, pricing, tool stack, and 3 to 5 competitor names plus their Facebook page handles. Claude loads this on every run so the audit is grounded in your specifics. - Run the audit. Paste the contents of
competitor-creative-audit.mdinto Claude Code and hit enter. Claude will confirm the mode (Full, Quick, Pre-launch, Focused), ask for any missing inputs, then write the full report todocs/competitor-creative-audit/YYYY-MM-DD/competitor-creative-audit-report.md. Screenshots land in a sibling data folder. 30 to 60 minutes end to end.
What each file does
README.mdSetup instructions and prerequisite API keys (Serper, Keywords Everywhere; Apify optional for TikTok and Instagram scraping). Read this first. Takes five minutes to follow.
CLAUDE.mdA business-briefing template. Fill in your positioning, audience, pricing, catalog, current creative pain, and the 3 to 5 competitors you want audited with Facebook page handles. Claude reads this on every run.
competitor-creative-audit.mdThe master prompt. Claude reads it and runs the audit end to end: Meta Ad Library scan, Google paid SERPs, social content, hook taxonomy, production-style audit, CTA pattern analysis, whitespace map, and the top 10 to 15 ranked starter ad briefs.
Sections that need your access to populate
The External layer runs on public data via our own API keys and produces a genuinely valuable report without any internal access granted. The Internal layer (creative fatigue scoring on your Meta Ads account, Quality Score diagnostics from Google Ads, Ahrefs Ads History for 24-month copy archives) populates once you share access. Without access the Internal sections stub out honestly with a "grant access to populate" note and the exact steps to unlock.
Wiring these accounts cleanly takes thirty to forty-five minutes end to end. Happy to walk you through the setup on a short call. Easier to do together than to chase credentials alone.
What to do with the report once you've run it
The top 3 starter briefs flagged as "ship this week" merge straight into an actions.md file in your project folder. Start there. Shoot the first brief. Let the CTR data reveal the next one.
The weekly review playbook (publishing separately) turns the audit from a one-time snapshot into a live operating system that refreshes every Monday. If you want the full GTM system built on your brand (this audit plus the thirty-plus downstream playbooks we run on every engagement), book a call above.
Get the full playbook
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