Competitor ad report template, with every section filled in

Nearly every "competitor ad report template" you can download is a presentation deck with blank boxes labelled Competitor 1, Competitor 2, Competitor 3. The structure is fine. The problem is that nobody publishing one has an ad corpus to fill it with, so you're left guessing whether the number you typed into the box is high or low. This is the nine-section structure we build our own competitor reporting around, and we've populated every section with real figures from the 50,982 ads we've qualified across 158 UK brands, so you can see what normal looks like before you judge your rival against it. Figures as at 4 November 2026.

Why the blank-template approach fails

A template solves the easy half of the problem. It tells you a competitor ad report needs a section on offers, one on creative, one on channels. That's a sensible skeleton, and if you've never written one, a skeleton helps.

What it cannot do is tell you what to conclude. You fill in "Competitor A: 20% off, shop-now CTA, no deadline" and then you stall, because the only honest next sentence is "and that is… normal? aggressive? timid?" Without a distribution to compare against, a competitor ad report is a screenshot album with headings. It describes. It does not diagnose.

This is the specific gap. Every section below has two parts: what to record, and what normal looks like. The second part is the bit a generic template structurally cannot give you, and it's the bit that turns a slide into a recommendation.

Section 1: Scope and method

First page, and the one most people skip. Record which rivals you covered, which platforms, the date you captured, and — critically — what you could not see. A report that states its own limits survives scrutiny; one that implies completeness gets destroyed by the first person who finds an ad you missed.

The honest caveats worth naming: ad libraries show what is live or recently live, not full campaign history. Google's Transparency Center stops paginating at roughly 900 creatives per advertiser, so for big spenders every count is a floor rather than a total — 48 of the brands we track have more than 900 Google creatives in our database, accumulated across repeated captures, so this is not a rare edge case. And a creative count is not a spend figure, for reasons we come to in Section 8.

Section 2: Volume — how many ads each rival is running

Record: live creative count per rival, per platform, with capture date.

What normal looks like: wider than people expect. Across the 158 brands in our corpus, qualified counts run from the low hundreds to around 1,957 for the largest. B&Q sits at 1,095 qualified creatives and Jet2 at 1,038 — both heavyweight advertisers, yet plenty of serious mid-market brands we track run a couple of hundred. So a rival with 40 live ads is a normal mid-market footprint, not a sleeping giant and not a threat. We break the distribution down in how many ads do competitors run.

The analytical move is to resist the obvious inference: more creatives does not reliably mean more spend. A single ad can carry enormous budget, and a long-running account accumulates variants that were never simultaneously funded.

Section 3: Channel mix

Record: creative counts split by platform, as a share of each rival's total.

What normal looks like: our whole corpus splits 30,466 Google, 15,365 Meta and 5,151 TikTok — but that reflects which libraries yield most readily, so use it as a shape, not a market share. The interesting finding is how little brands differ at the top of the funnel and how much they differ underneath. B&Q runs 895 Google, 110 Meta, 90 TikTok. Jet2 runs 839 Google, 111 Meta, 88 TikTok. Almost identical channel posture — two completely different businesses.

Which tells you something useful: channel mix alone rarely separates competitors in UK retail and travel. The separation is in the offer and the hook, which is why those get the most space in this template.

Section 4: Offer mechanics

Record, per ad: the offer mechanic (percentage off, amount off, free delivery, finance, free trial, gift, bundle, BOGOF, or none), the stated figure, whether a promo code appears, and any deadline or condition. Where the ad states no figure, write "none stated" rather than filling in the brand's usual offer — that discipline is what keeps your averages honest.

What normal looks like: this is the table a blank template can't give you. Offer mechanics across all 50,982 qualified ads:

Two findings reframe how you read a rival's offer. First, two thirds of UK paid creative carries no offer at all — only 33.4% state any mechanic. If your competitor's ads are mostly offer-free, that is the market norm, not a gap in their strategy. Second, BOGOF is effectively extinct in paid creative at 0.1%. Percentage-off dominates the discounting that does happen, and finance beats free delivery — a detail that surprises retail marketers who assume shipping is the default sweetener.

Promo codes are rarer still: just 876 of 50,982 ads show a visible code, and only 1,989 carry an explicit deadline. So a rival putting codes in paid creative is doing something deliberate, usually bridging affiliate or email into paid — and that's a channel in their mix worth a line in your report.

Worked example: the same section, two brands

Here is why the benchmark matters. Compare offer mechanics for two of our tracked brands:

B&Q's 69.9% offer-free rate is slightly above the 66.2% corpus norm — a brand competing on range and convenience, using free delivery as its lever. Jet2 at 48.8% percentage-off is running four times the corpus rate of discount mechanics. Neither sentence is available to you without the benchmark column, and both are the kind of line a client can act on.

A methodological caveat we'd rather state than hide: count mechanics from what the ad copy says, not from a parsed discount percentage. Our own extracted discount figure is unreliable — it inherits house-wide offers and records 100 for free trials and fixed-pound reductions. We count mechanics from the offer type and the ad's key message. If you're building this by hand, read the creative; don't trust a regex.

Section 5: Hooks and creative angle

Record, per ad: the opening persuasion move — the first thing the ad asks the viewer to believe or feel.

What normal looks like: hook types across the corpus:

The headline: bold claims and discount-led hooks are 46.4% of UK paid creative between them, while testimonial and statistic hooks — the two marketers most often describe as underused — really are underused, at a combined 3.8%. Whether that's an opportunity or a reflection of what works is your judgement; our data says what is, not what wins.

The per-brand split is where this section earns its place. Jet2 runs 788 of 1,038 ads discount-led — 75.9%, against a 22.6% norm. That is a brand whose entire creative strategy is price. B&Q spreads across bold claim (314), discount-led (258) and problem/solution (202) — a portfolio approach. Those are two entirely different briefs, and the concentration figure is the evidence. More on reading hooks in Facebook ad hook examples.

Section 6: Urgency and deadlines

Record: share of ads carrying a deadline, countdown or scarcity claim.

What normal looks like: only 1,989 ads of 50,982 (3.9%) carry an explicit offer deadline, so urgency is far less common in paid creative than the marketing literature implies. The per-brand spread is dramatic: Jet2 carries deadlines on 162 ads with a mean urgency score of 44.2, against B&Q's 53 deadlines and mean of 20.9. Jet2 is running a genuine urgency strategy; B&Q isn't. Worth distinguishing real deadlines from permanent fake ones — see fake urgency in ads.

Section 7: Objectives and CTAs

Record: the apparent campaign objective and the call-to-action used.

What normal looks like: objectives split 17,514 sale, 12,397 brand, 10,474 lead generation, 6,844 promo, 1,095 launch. CTAs are heavily concentrated: shop-now accounts for 22,102 ads, learn-more 8,251, get-offer 4,553, sign-up 3,623, book 3,454, and 7,896 ads use no CTA at all. Human faces appear in 10,345 ads — 20.3% — which is far lower than most people guess, and varies enormously by platform, so judge face usage against the channel rather than the whole.

Section 8: Spend — and why this section is honest about not knowing

Here is where most competitor ad report templates quietly mislead, by including a "competitor spend" box as though it were observable. It isn't.

Neither the Google Ads Transparency Center nor the Meta Ad Library publishes spend or impression figures for ordinary commercial advertisers. Both disclose spend and impression ranges only for political, electoral and social-issue advertising, where regulation requires it. For a retailer, an airline or a SaaS company, no platform discloses a single pound.

So anything presenting itself as your rival's ad spend is a model, not a measurement — typically keyword volumes times estimated CPCs, covering paid search only. Our recommendation: delete the spend box and replace it with launch pacing — new creatives per month, which you can observe directly and which genuinely indicates whether a rival is scaling up or pulling back. We work through the methods and their error bars in how to estimate competitor ad spend in the UK.

Section 9: Findings and recommended tests

Two to four prioritised actions, each tied to a figure from a section above. The form that works:

1. Observation — "Rival runs 75.9% discount-led hooks."
2. Benchmark — "Corpus norm is 22.6%."
3. Hypothesis — "They've trained their audience to wait for price; a non-price angle is uncontested in this category."
4. Test — "Run problem/solution creative against our top segment for four weeks, measure blended CAC against the discount-led control."

If a finding can't be written in that shape, it belongs in an appendix. The discipline forces every claim to carry its evidence.

Using the template

Build it in a spreadsheet: one row per ad, with columns for platform, offer mechanic, stated figure, promo code, deadline, hook type, CTA and objective. Every section above is a pivot table on that one sheet. The work is the tagging, not the analysis — expect a couple of hours per rival for a hundred ads, which is why most people cap scope at three to five competitors.

The benchmark columns are what separate this from the blank-box downloads, and you're welcome to use ours whether or not you buy anything from us. If you'd rather not do the tagging, our Brand Report does it for you: every ad we've captured for a brand, tagged on these same fields, with the channel mix, new creatives, promotions, evergreen set and creative angles written up and benchmarked — see the AdRival landing page. For the methods behind each section, see the six-step competitor ad audit and competitor ad analysis.