Most audience profiles are written from imagination: a made-up persona with a name, an age and a favorite coffee shop. They feel useful and change nothing. A better profile starts from evidence of who already buys products like yours.
Your competitors have paid to find that out. Every ad they keep running, every landing page they rewrite and every email they send is the result of tests on real customers. Study them in a structured way and you can define your audience before you spend your own budget.
Below: which sources to read, what each one tells you about the buyer, and how to turn it all into a one-page profile, with a worked example.
Why competitors are the best place to start
Surveys and customer interviews are valuable, but you need customers to run them. Before you have any, the closest evidence is the behavior of brands already selling to the people you want.
Long-running ads are the key. A brand keeps an ad live only while it pays, so the message in a long-running ad is a message that works on someone. Your job is to work out who that someone is.
One caution: a competitor's audience is a starting hypothesis, not a fact. You confirm it with your own tests.
Step 1: pick the right competitors
Choose 5 to 10 brands that sell a similar product, at a similar price, to the kind of customer you want. A premium brand and a bargain store can sell the same item to very different people, so price matters as much as product.
Include a couple of fast-growing smaller stores, not only the market leader. Smaller brands often find an audience the leader ignores.
Step 2: read the ad copy and hooks
The first line of an ad, or the first seconds of a video, is the hook. It is written to stop one kind of person. Collect the hooks from each competitor's long-running ads and look for patterns.
- The problem named. "Back pain after a long day at the desk" speaks to office workers. "Tired of crowded gyms?" speaks to someone else entirely.
- The words used. Jargon signals experts. Plain words signal beginners. Slang and emojis point to a younger crowd.
- The objection answered. Ads that stress "easy returns" or "no subscription" tell you what makes this buyer hesitate.
- The outcome promised. Saving time, looking good, feeling safe or saving money each point to a different motivation.
Count which themes repeat. A theme that several competitors keep running is a strong clue about what the audience cares about.
Step 3: study the creatives
The visuals tell you who the brand thinks is watching. Note who appears in the ads, the format and the setting.
- Who is on screen. A parent in a kitchen, a student in a dorm room, a retiree in a garden. Brands cast people their buyers identify with.
- The format. A mix heavy on video, and on UGC style clips filmed on a phone, suggests the audience responds to real people more than to polished product shots.
- Setting and props. Homes, cars, offices and outdoor scenes reveal lifestyle and budget.
Step 4: follow the ads to the landing pages
The landing page is where the brand finishes the argument the ad started. Read it as the buyer would.
- What does the headline promise, and does it match the ad?
- Which worries do the FAQ and the reviews answer: shipping time, sizing, safety, durability?
- How is the offer built: a single item, a bundle, a subscription, a free gift?
- Which reviews are shown first? Brands feature reviews from the customers they want more of.
If one brand sends different ads to different landing pages, compare them. Each page is often aimed at a different segment, such as gift buyers versus people buying for themselves.
Step 5: check where the ads run
The countries a competitor's ads reach show where its buyers are. A brand that concentrates its ads on a few countries has probably found that those markets pay.
Compare that with the countries its store visitors come from. When both point to the same places, you have a clear answer. When they differ, the brand may be testing new markets, or getting visitors from channels other than ads.
Age and gender breakdowns, where they are available, add another layer. Treat them as a guide: they show who saw the ads, which is not always the same as who bought.
Step 6: read their emails and offers
Emails show how a brand talks to people who already bought or signed up. That is the audience after the first sale, and it often tells you more than the ads do.
- Tone. Friendly and personal, or expert and technical?
- Promotions. Frequent discounts suggest a price-sensitive buyer. Launches and stories with few discounts suggest buyers who care about the brand itself.
- Timing. Sending on weekday mornings rather than weekend evenings hints at when the audience reads.
- The welcome emails. The welcome series reveals what the brand thinks a new subscriber needs to hear before buying.
Turn it into an audience profile
Now combine what you found into one page. Keep it short, back every line with something you saw, and note where it came from.
Here is an example for an imaginary store selling ergonomic desk accessories, built from the ads, landing pages and emails of five competitors. The findings are illustrative.
| Part of the profile | What we found (example) | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Who | Office and remote workers, roughly 28 to 45, who spend long days at a desk | People shown in the ads, home office settings, audience breakdowns |
| Main problem | Neck and back discomfort after long workdays | The most repeated hook in competitors' long-running ads |
| Motivation | Feeling better at work, and a tidier desk | Outcomes promised in ad copy and landing page headlines |
| Main objections | Will it really help? Will it fit my desk? | FAQ sections, the reviews shown first, trial periods in the ads |
| Where | United States, United Kingdom, Germany | Countries the ads reach and the stores' visitor countries |
| Price and offer | Mid-priced, responds to bundles more than to discounts | Landing page offers, few discount-led emails |
| Message that works | Short video of a person at a real desk, before and after | Format mix and the longest-running creatives |
Notice what the profile leaves out: invented hobbies, a name, a favorite brand. Every line is something you can act on in an ad, a landing page or an offer.
Use the profile to plan your tests
Turn each line into something you can test: the main problem becomes your first hook, and the objections become the headline and the FAQ of your landing page. The offer line tells you whether to lead with a bundle or a discount.
Then look for the gap. If every competitor targets remote workers, you could test a hook for students or gamers who sit just as long. The profile shows where the crowd is, which also shows where it is not.
Before you scale an audience, estimate what one of its customers is worth over time with the customer lifetime value calculator. An audience that buys again can justify a higher cost for the first sale.
Review the profile after your first tests. Once you have your own results, they beat any outside evidence.
How to do this with SellWinners
Each step above has a home in SellWinners. Here is where to look.
Pick your competitors
In Shops in the app, search your product by product name, then use the best-seller price filter to keep stores at your price level and add the market countries you care about. Open a strong store and check its Similar tab: Similar Shops lists the closest competitors with a similarity score, traffic and growth.
Read hooks, copy and creatives
In the Ads Library, use the brand filter to list one competitor's Meta ads. Keep the active ones, set a minimum days running and sort by Longest running. Each ad shows its copy, headline, call to action and landing page, with the video transcript and hook when available.
For a deeper read, add the brand to the Brand Tracker. Its reports group the hooks, video scripts, headlines, ad texts and landing pages, and show the format mix and the audience by country, age and gender. See Brand Tracker for every report.
Check countries and visitors
Filter ads by ad countries in the Ads Library to see which brands reach your market. Open a store in Shops to see the countries its visitors come from, as described on the Shop Analytics page.
In Advertisers in the app, filter by country, language, and audience age and gender to find other brands speaking to the same people.
Read the emails
On a store's page, the Emails tab lists what it sends, with its campaign mix and weekly rhythm (Shop Emails). To compare welcome emails across brands, open the Email Library and set the campaign type to Welcome.
Save the best examples to a board in the app and keep it next to your profile, so the evidence behind each line is one click away.
Key takeaways
- Build your audience profile from evidence, not imagination: competitors' long-running ads show messages that already work.
- Read six sources: hooks and copy, creatives, landing pages, ad countries, visitor countries and emails.
- Keep the profile to one page, with the evidence for every line, and turn each line into a test.
- Look for the audience competitors ignore, and update the profile once your own results come in.
Ready to study your competitors? Create a free account to search Shopify stores and open each shop's Meta ad library, or compare plans on the pricing page.