A competitor analysis template for social media ads and Google ads

A competitor analysis template for social media usually asks for follower counts and posting frequency. The more useful columns are the paid ones: which ads a rival is running on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, what they promise, and how long they have been live. Put those next to Google Ads and you see what each competitor pays to say. This guide covers just those columns and how to fill them each quarter.

Where the ad columns sit

The full competitor analysis template on seogeoaeo.ai has one row per site and twelve columns, from organic traffic to AI citations. Two of them cover paid media:

• Google Ads: how many ads are running, and the promise in the one that has run longest.
• Social ads: ads running on Meta and LinkedIn, by platform.

For a social media focus, split that second column into Meta ads and LinkedIn ads, and add a Longest-running message column. Keep your own company in row one; your ad count only means something next to theirs.

Record run time, not spend

Google, Meta and LinkedIn all publish ads, but none of them shows what an ordinary advertiser spends. Meta shows spend and reach only for social issue, election and political ads. LinkedIn does not list spend at all. So do not guess a budget. Note how long each ad has been live instead. An ad still running after several months is one the company keeps paying for, which is the closest public signal of what works for them.

Filling the columns by hand

The official libraries are free:

• Google Ads Transparency Center: search by advertiser to see its ads with format, region and when each last ran.
• Meta Ad Library: search a page or keyword to see active ads across Meta's apps.
• LinkedIn Ad Library: search by company, payer, keyword, country or date. It covers ads that ran after June 1, 2023 and keeps each for a year after its last impression.

For five rivals across three libraries, that is fifteen searches and a lot of copying start dates into cells.

Filling them with ad finders

seogeoaeo.ai turns each library search into a short report, priced per run:

All three together cost 25 credits per rival, so five rivals come to 125. The Google tool samples the 100 most recently shown ads and reads up to 10 text ads. The Meta tool shows wording and links out to the library for images and video. None of them reveals bid keywords, spend or performance, because the platforms do not publish those.

What to look for

Read the ad columns across the rows, not down them:

• A rival with dozens of Google ads whose headlines name your product is fighting for comparison searches. In the seogeoaeo.ai worked example, an invented rival runs 40 Google ads with headlines naming other products, and the response is to publish your own comparison pages.
• A rival with heavy LinkedIn ads and almost no organic traffic is a sales competitor. Its messages belong with your sales team, not in your content plan.
• A message that survives several refreshes is the one to answer.

Watch between refreshes

The template is a quarterly snapshot. If one rival's ads matter enough to follow week to week, a page monitor can watch its library page or landing pages and alert you when the offer changes. That is a different job from the template, which compares rivals side by side at one point in time.

The rest of the row

The ad columns are cheap, but they are only part of the story. The same tool set fills traffic, keywords and links with Domain Overview (50 credits) and the keywords you lack with Keyword Gap (85). A full row runs to about 195 credits, and plans start at $29 a month for 2,000. For daily rank positions, use a suite such as Semrush; seogeoaeo.ai has no rank tracker.