We ran the "find a niche problem" playbook on intermittent fasting. Here's what it actually found.
Every guide to niche research says the same thing: hunt for frustration, mine the reviews, check who's paying for ads, find the gap. Good advice. Also slow -- a week of tabs and spreadsheets if you do it by hand.
We built ProfitSpyTools to do that hunt in minutes, and we test it on a niche we're actually in: intermittent fasting. This is what it turned up in September 2026. Real output, dated, with the bits that didn't work included.
1. Who's actually paying for search ads (SpyFu)
Four apps dominate the space: Zero, BodyFast, Fastic and DoFasting. The assumption is they're all bidding hard on Google.
They aren't. BodyFast is the only one buying paid search -- roughly $1,133 a month, average position 3.3. Zero, Fastic and DoFasting are organic-only on Google.
Why that matters: if you're an affiliate thinking about search ads in this niche, you've got one real competitor in the auction, not four. That's a very different budget conversation.
2. Where the ads really run (Tracker / Network Detector)
Google-only tools stop at point 1. Our pixel detector reads the competitors' actual landing pages.
Fastic's landing page carries the pixels for all six major ad platforms -- Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest, Snap and X. Organic on Google, everywhere on social. A Google-only spy tool would tell you Fastic isn't advertising. It's the heaviest advertiser in the niche.
3. What the ads say (Meta Ad Library)
We pulled BodyFast's and Fastic's live Meta creative.
- Fastic: emoji benefit-stacks, rhetorical-question openers, one long "without X, without Y" listicle with a 100k-user social-proof line.
- BodyFast: a "personal fasting plan" video that's been running since 2024, press logos (Apple, Women's Health, a 4.7 star rating), and body-part callouts.
What neither does: curiosity. Nobody in this niche opens with a hook that makes you need to know the answer. That gap is where our own test ads went (more on that when the numbers are in -- we'll publish them either way).
4. Which offer to promote (Niche Pipeline + ClickBank)
The pipeline resolved the niche to Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon on ClickBank -- instant hoplink, no approval queue. Honest numbers from the marketplace listing: EPC around $0.03, conversion rate 0.27%, about $10.95 average per sale.
That last figure is the important one. At ~$11 a sale you need roughly one sale per six leads just to cover a $1.70 lead -- which is what our first Meta test is producing. Low-ticket ClickBank offers are fine for proving a funnel works; they are not where the money is. We've since set a house rule: don't test a niche unless the offer pays $30+ or recurring.
5. What didn't work -- and cost money finding out
Two ad-spy tools we were paying for returned nothing for this niche:
- Foreplay ($175/mo): no results for BodyFast, bodyfast.app, or Fastic.
- Minea (free tier): same.
PowerAdSpy found every brand -- but only after switching on its "Meta Ads Library" toggle, which is off by default. With it off, searching "Fastic" returned an unrelated apparel brand. We've written that caveat into our free tool & network directory so nobody else pays to learn it.
Disclosure: we're a PowerAdSpy affiliate. The two tools that failed were the ones we were paying for at the time.
What we'd do with this if we were starting today
- Skip Google search ads unless you can out-bid BodyFast.
- Study Fastic's social creative, not their Google presence.
- Open with a curiosity hook -- nobody else is.
- Find a better-paying offer than an $11 ebook before you scale anything.
All of the above came from about a minute of pipeline time plus an afternoon reading the output. That's the point of the tool: not magic, just the boring research done faster and written down honestly.
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