Verified against Claude · 2026-07-27
Analyze a competitor's ad copy for the strategy behind it
Paste in a competitor ad you spotted and get a structured breakdown of the strategy behind it — not just a compliment on their copywriting.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Here is a competitor ad I spotted: Headline: "Still doing payroll by hand?" Body: "Switch to RunPay and process payroll in under 10 minutes. Trusted by 12,000+ Indian SMBs. Start your free trial." CTA: "Try RunPay Free" Seen on: Meta Feed ad, seen while scrolling Instagram. For context, I sell: A payroll and compliance tool for Indian SMBs, similar price point. My current angle: Our ads currently lead with "100% PF/ESI compliant, always". Break this ad down: 1. What audience and buying-stage does this ad appear to target (cold / aware / comparison-shopping)? What in the copy signals that? 2. What's the core persuasion mechanism — pain-agitation, social proof, price/speed, authority, something else — and which specific words or phrases carry it? 3. What claim(s) in this ad would you NOT be able to make honestly for my product, and which ones could I make for real? 4. What's the most likely weakness in this ad a prospect would notice (vague proof point, unverifiable claim, missing objection-handling)? 5. Based on this, suggest one ad angle for my product that responds to the same audience need without copying their specific wording or claims. Be specific about what's actually happening in the copy, not generic praise like "strong CTA" — point to the exact phrase and explain the mechanism.
Customize the highlighted detailsoptional — the prompt above already works
Why this works
Competitor-ad analysis is easy to do badly — either restating what the ad says, or generic copywriting-textbook praise that doesn't transfer to action. Structuring the analysis around audience signal, persuasion mechanism, and an honest claims-comparison (what you could and couldn't say for real) turns 'that's a good ad' into a specific, actionable input for your own creative, and forces the model to name the exact phrase doing the work rather than a vague summary. The explicit instruction against copying wording also keeps the output as inspiration, not something that risks looking derivative.
What you get back
1. Audience/stage: Cold-to-aware — "Still doing payroll by hand?" targets people who haven't considered switching yet, not comparison shoppers. 2. Mechanism: Pain-agitation (the question) paired with speed-based social proof ("under 10 minutes," "12,000+ SMBs") — the number is doing the trust-building, not the product description. 3. Claims you could make for real: speed and trust-through-scale, if you have comparable numbers. Not honestly makeable: implying payroll compliance is solved passively — that's a different value prop than speed...
Verified against
Claude Claude Opus 4.5 · 2026-07-27
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-07-28
Changelog
- 2026-07-28 — Initial version.
Need this built into your business?
If a prompt isn't enough — Google Ads management, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
EXPLORE GOOGLE ADS MANAGEMENT
