DEEP DIVE

How to find companies spending money on ads, how much they’re spending, & more

I recently got an email from a company asking to sponsor this newsletter - good timing because we’re almost at 2k subscribers. It got me thinking about advertising.

Here’s how we can do this with Clay.

1) Find relevant companies

Open Clay, select Find Companies, and create your filter.

Since my newsletter is about GTM, I will use that to find GTM or AI companies (not agencies) that are building cool tools I’d want to feature in my newsletter.

It looks like there are ~35,000 in the USA — not bad!

Now, our table has enriched company data that match our criteria.

2) Get website traffic

We can use SemRush or the Website Traffic Waterfall to pull in this data easily.

A waterfall just means that we check multiple data providers to find the data point.

It looks like we got ~100% fill rate on Website Traffic using SemRush!

3) Get paid social visits

Getting website traffic is just one part of the equation.

We need paid traffic visits to begin estimating their Meta ad spend budget.

SemRush has paid social traffic data as well, so we can create a new column for that.

4) Get revenue

Clay has waterfalls for many data points - including revenue.

We can use revenue as a proxy for estimating ad spend because it gives us a sense of how big this company is - and what percentage of sales is coming from paid ads.

We can use a sweet combo to figure this out:

1. Annual Revenue Waterfall

2. Custom Formula to divide that by 12

This a software company’s ARR and MRR (annual/monthly recurring revenue)

5) Check if they're running active meta ads

We can use Adyntel to check if a company is running active Meta ads.

There’s lots of other data in this action, but for now, this simple true/false statement will help us narrow down our list → only companies that are running Meta ads.

6) Find total ad spend

We can use Adbeat to figure out the total ad spend for a company in the last 30 days.

Note: this is cumulative ad spend across all channels.

We need to narrow this to Meta.

7) Estimate Meta spend with AI

Using our data and AI, I create a formula to estimate Meta ad spend.

We could hard-code it, but I’m lazy and enjoy using AI.

Here’s the basic formula we are going to give AI:

Estimated Monthly Meta Ad Spend = 

(Monthly Paid Social Visits × 0.70)× CPC 

Where:

0.70 = Meta’s assumed market share of paid social

CPC =

$0.90 if running 1–10 ads
$1.50 if running 11–50 ads
$2.10 if running >50 ads

Remember, we're getting # of ads from Adyntel

And voila! You’ll end up with results that you can filter on:

Conclusion: the GTM workflow you need to build targeted outreach lists

You can use this workflow to build qualified outreach lists or vet your inbound leads.

Yes, it’s an estimate, but by using trusted data providers, we can increase accuracy.

I’ll let you know the results of my outreach using this table.

Last thing:

Learn how to build GTM workflows like this AND vibe-code your dream app during the 30-day Clay x Lovable Challenge I’m hosting live starting next week.

I’ll walk you through the entire process and answer your questions live.