Ad Intelligence

Searching an ad library by keyword returns whatever happens to use your words. One run fetched five hundred ads on five fashion terms and three quarters of them were romance novels.

So Shopdeck does not search by keyword. It watches the shops you name. For each one it reads the shop’s own catalogue — every product page, photo and price — and matches the ads it finds against that catalogue. That is how it can say what a competitor is putting money behind, and for how long.

Which makes your list of watched shops the whole strategy. An empty list is the honest explanation for an empty Winners screen.

• Winners — the ranked list. Where you spend your time. See Winners and creatives.
• Creatives — the ads themselves, browsable and filterable. The copy, the video, how long it has run.
• Competitors — your watchlist, and the suggestions Shopdeck found. Needs the researcher role.
• Admin — the machinery: sources, runs, health, errors. Needs the admin role. See Runs and sources.

The order is deliberate — it is the order of the questions you actually ask. It used to be twelve entries.

1. Say what you sell

   Competitors → the panel What you sell. Tick your categories and who you sell to. Only products like those can become winners; everything else is filed away rather than deleted.

   Get this right first, or you will be reading about products you do not sell.

2. Add the shops you compete with

   Same screen, the Watched section. Paste their web addresses, one per line. Each is read while you wait, so you find out immediately whether its catalogue is readable.

   Add the Meta page id too

   Without it, Shopdeck can see what a shop sells but not what it advertises — and what it advertises is the whole point. You find the id in the address bar of that shop’s ad library page, after view_all_page_id=.

   Each row tells you plainly which of the two you have: Catalogue and ads, Catalogue only, Ads only, or Nothing to watch yet.

3. Let it run, or start it yourself

   The nightly runs collect on their own. To see something tonight, go to Admin → Data and press Run everything.

4. Grow the list from Suggested

   The keyword sweep finds pages that use your words and are not on your list. Those are leads, not winners — nothing there is scored. Say yes (pasting the shop’s own address) or no.

Below about sixty watched shops the Winners screen keeps nudging you to add more, because the quality of the output is mostly a function of the size of that list.

Two habits worth knowing, because they are unusual and they are the reason the screen is trustworthy.

• An empty screen explains itself. Rather than “no results”, you get a checklist with real counts: how many shops are watched, how many have a Meta page, how many products were read, how many ads were linked. The first unmet step is the thing to fix.
• Every panel says where its numbers came from. Platform data, Shopdeck analysis, or both. You are never left guessing whether a figure was published or inferred.

• It is not evidence of revenue. The score measures visible commercial signals — how many ads, how long, how wide. Nobody outside a shop can see its revenue, and Shopdeck says so wherever a score appears.
• It never touches your ad accounts. Read-only research. What you do with it happens in the Campaign Builder.