Become a super sleuth and find your competitors’ ads with these tips and tools.
They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Now in the online advertising world, your competitors aren’t exactly your enemies (unless you take life way too seriously and in which case you may need to do some self-work), but they are a threat to your business if you don’t pay attention to what they’re doing.
So in this post, I’m going to provide nine ways to spy on your competitors’ ads so you can keep your strategy agile, relevant, and effective.
Analyzing ads and keywords is a must when doing a competitive analysis. Here are nine of our favorite tools for spying on your competitors’ ads.
Let’s dive into each one.
The Meta/Facebook Ads Library shows you all ads currently running across Meta technologies, including:
Here’s an example of a SoFi ad:
The only downside here is that you have to know the name of the competitor you’re searching for. Since there is no filtering, your keyword search results can be all over the place.
Things to pay attention to:
🛑 Want to know how your Facebook ads are really performing? Find out with our free Facebook Ads Performance Grader!
Any business with a good digital advertising strategy is going to be running retargeting ads. This means that after people visit their website, those people will see ads for that business on other websites they visit and on social media.
So visit their website a few times, click on different pages, take certain actions and then keep an eye out for social and display ads for that business in subsequent days or even weeks.
Things to pay attention to here:
If you do get retargeted by your competitor with an ad on Facebook, you can do even more marketing competitive analysis by clicking into the ad itself.
Click those three dots in the upper right:
You’ll then see options for “Why you saw this ad.” In the example below, Meta tells me that I’m seeing this ad from impact.com because of the advertiser’s choices as well as my activity on Facebook.
When I click into “Advertiser choices,” I learn that impact.com is targeting people who are part of a hashed (anonymized) list, are 25 and older, and are in the United States.
Comprehensive SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush offer competitive analysis capabilities that allow you to delve into not just the organic performance of your competitors’ sights, but their paid performance too.
For example, in Semrush, you can use “Domain overview” on the “Competitive analysis” tab to look at another site’s top paid keywords and even sample text ads.
Click on “view details” and you can see details on copy and position tracking over time for each keyword.
You can also look at estimated traffic volume and costs for paid keywords:
Things to look for here:
For more guidance here, check out our post on how to do a competitive keyword analysis.
🔎 Need help finding the right keywords? Try our Free Keyword Tool!
If you don’t have an SEO tool, you can always just search right on Google for your competitor’s brand name or the service they provide. This will show you whether they’re running ads, and if they are, you’ll be able to see their ad copy and landing page—but you won’t get any of the keyword data and position tracking that we mentioned above.
Things to look for here
In the below example, I searched for “zendesk” and you can see that Zoho is actually ranking above Zendesk for that keyword!
If you want a better look at what Google Ads your competitors are running, you can try Google’s Transparency Center. This is essentially their ads library.
You can search for text, ad, and video ads from your competitors or other businesses to get inspiration for your own campaigns.
Dive deeper into how to use the Google Ads library here.
🚨 What results are your competitors getting from Google Ads? Download our latest Google Ads Benchmarks to find out!
Are your competitors running ads on TikTok? There’s one easy way to find out: the TikTok Ads Library.
Within the TikTok Ads Library, you can find your competitors’ ads (if they’re running TikTok ads) or just browse other ads on the platform.
We detail 10+ ways you can use the TikTok Ads Library to create better ads here.
The tools mentioned above are primarily SEO tools with additional capabilities for competitive intelligence, particularly in the PPC realm.
There are also competitive intelligence tools that offer competitive ad intelligence as well, like Similarweb.
Just like with Semrush, you can use Similarweb to find your competitors’ keywords, view their search ad position, estimated ad impressions, traffic share from specific ads, and keyword data.
As for which tool is better, you’re getting mostly the same information from each one, so it’s more a matter of what else you want the tool to do. If you want a tool focused on SEO, backlinks, and organic performance, then Semrush is your best bet. If you’re focused more on market research, data enrichment, and customer journey mapping, Similarweb is probably the better option.
And of course there are also plenty of tools dedicated to ad intelligence only. Take Adbeat, for example. Type in a brand name and with the free version, you can see:
You can also browse a gallery of the brand’s ads and view the ad’s date, type, and size:
Keeping an eye on your competitors’ ads gives you additional insights to inform your strategy and can inspire ideas for copy and creative. Add these seven tools to your competitive analysis arsenal and you’ll keep yourself ahead of the game!
