A promotions calendar of your rivals

Why it matters

Promotions tend to repeat from one year to the next. Once you have logged a rival's year, you can see roughly when their next sale should land and what it may look like. Then you choose: meet them on the same weekend with a stronger offer, or go early or late when the market is quieter.

This recipe draws on both the site and the ads. The competitor website monitor and competitor ad watch loops are both in build and not on sale; together they will log banners, offer pages and promotional ads. For now the manual log below builds the same calendar, one entry at a time.

What you need

• - Up to three rivals, with their home pages and advertiser names
• - The public ad libraries (Meta Ad Library and Google Ads Transparency Center)
• - A seed inbox: a dedicated business email address signed up to each rival's newsletter
• - A simple calendar sheet with one row per promotion

Setup

1. Set up a dedicated business email address and sign it up to each rival's newsletter. Use it only for this, and unsubscribe once your analysis is done.
2. Check each rival's home page and offer pages at the start of each month and whenever a seasonal moment approaches, and screenshot any banner or offer.
3. Search the ad libraries for each rival, filtered to the period you are logging, and note promotional ads and their start dates.
4. Log every promotion in the sheet: rival, dates seen, offer wording, mechanic, channels where you saw it.
5. At the end of each quarter, paste the log into the prompt below to turn it into a calendar and a list of gaps.

The prompt

Paste this into any capable model, followed by the evidence you gathered in the setup.

You are helping a UK business build a promotions calendar from its rivals' past offers.
Below is my log. Each row has: rival, date first seen, date last seen (if known), offer wording, mechanic (discount, bundle, free delivery, gift, other), and channels where it appeared (site, email, Meta ads, Google ads).
Do this:
1. Lay out a month-by-month calendar showing which rival promoted what, quoting the offer wording.
2. Identify patterns: moments each rival always uses, mechanics they prefer, and channels they lean on. Only call something a pattern if it appears more than once in the log.
3. List the gaps: months or seasonal moments where no rival in the log promoted.
4. Suggest three to five promotion ideas for us, each tied to a gap or a pattern, rated for effort (low/medium/high) and likely impact (low/medium/high), with a reason.
5. Note where the log is too thin to draw a conclusion.
Rules:
- Quote the evidence for every point, word for word, and say where it came from (which rival, which page or ad, which date I captured it).
- Label each point OBSERVATION (you can see it in the evidence) or HYPOTHESIS (your reading of why). Never present a hypothesis as a proven cause.
- Never invent a figure, a date, a price or a result. If the evidence does not show it, write "not in the evidence".
- Use British English and plain words.

Promotions log:
[paste the log here]

Doing it by hand today

The calendar takes a full year of logging before it is complete, so start now and keep going. Even one quarter of entries usually shows which rival discounts most often and which never does.

Use the ad libraries and your seed inbox to see promotions, never their paid ads in search results: clicking a rival's ad costs them money. The Meta Ad Library shows when each ad started running, which helps you date a sale you missed on the site.

When you plan your own response, the discount designer helps you shape an offer that protects margin.