Tear-down
Why ads that run past 30 days usually print money
An ad that’s been live for a month is a revealed preference. No one burns money on a losing creative that long — here’s how to read the signal and steal the insight.
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How to build a competitor watchlist in 15 minutes
A repeatable workflow we use ourselves: which competitors to add, how to organise them, and what to ignore. Everything inside Adstronaut — no spreadsheet.
Playbook••7 min read
Step 1 — The five categories to cover
A good watchlist has five buckets, not a flat list. Direct competitors (same product, same price), premium alternatives (what your customer upgrades to), budget alternatives (what they downgrade to), adjacent brands (same audience, different category), and case studies (brands you admire but don’t compete with).
The first three tell you how your category is evolving. The last two teach you creative craft. Mix them intentionally or your feed of alerts turns into noise.
Step 2 — Finding the right pages, fast
Open the Ad Library, search by keyword (not brand name), and set the country filter to your primary market. Scroll for five minutes and save every page that has 10+ active ads. That’s your initial list.
Then look at what your customers follow. Instagram ‘similar suggestions’, TikTok For You of someone in your demographic, and Facebook’s ‘people also like’ sidebar will surface brands no search query ever would.
Step 3 — Wire it into Adstronaut
Paste each Page URL into Adstronaut, tag it with one of the five buckets above, and choose a cadence: instant alerts for the 3-5 brands you obsess over, daily digest for everything else. That keeps your inbox signal-dense.
Fifteen minutes in, you’ll have a living feed of the competitive landscape that updates itself forever. Revisit the list every quarter and prune brands that stopped testing — they’ve either pivoted or died, and either way they’re not teaching you anything.
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