How do competitor ads affect my campaign performance?

For paid search, increased competition will raise your cost-per-click. If your ad quality score is low, you'll rank lower and receive fewer clicks. The impact is smaller for paid social, as you are unlikely to bid on the exact same audience.

How do I check my competitors' Google Ads performance?

You can check your competitor's Google Ads performance by looking up their URL or business name on ad analysis tools like Google's Ad Transparency Center. You can also use Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool for a comprehensive analysis.

How to gauge a competitor's budget?

There's no way to know for sure. While you can manually calculate it using tools like SEMRush, a better alternative would be Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence tool.

How to Analyze Competitor Ads on Facebook, Google and more

At Kaya, we help startups grow 10x faster through paid ads.

Without spending a cent, we can tap into an often overlooked superpower to refine our marketing strategy— analyzing competitors' ads.

Most ad platforms provide an ads library where you can search for a given company and see their historical ads. In this post, we’ll share their links and, most importantly, what you need to pay attention to for each.

Google (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail)
LinkedIn
Meta (Facebook and Instagram)
TikTok
X (formerly known as Twitter)

The process of manually gathering competitor ad data is time-consuming and you can't see all the ads in one place.

Other Spy Tools for Market Domination

1. Google

Link to ad library: Google Ads Transparency Center

In Google Ads Transparency Center, you can see all ads within the Google ecosystem, including Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail.

Pay close attention to:

What USPs do they focus on? Google Ads have a very limited word count, so advertisers tend to focus on key selling points that convert.
When was the ad last shown? Click on each ad to see this info. This is particularly useful for experimental ads, as you can gauge if they are working for the advertisers.

Google Ads Transparency Center displaying Stripe ads promoting Atlas, Payment Links, and subscription payment solutions with brief descriptions and visuals. — At Google Ads Transparency Center, you can find ads from Google's ad ecosystem, including: Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail. In this example, we've filtered for Stripe's ads in the US.

For Search, you can see their keywords and ad copies using tools like Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool, Semrush and Spyfu.

If you are running ads‍

You can see the list of competitors bidding on the same auctions from the Google Auction Insights Report.

Pay close attention to:

Search impression share: It shows how often an advertiser appears in the search results compared to how many times they could have. This metric is heavily influenced by budget. By changing the report date, you can infer changes in the competitor’s budget.
Unexpected competitors? This could be a sign that your targeting keywords are too broad

With Google Ads Transparency Center, you can only see the Google Ads from one competitor at a time.

2. LinkedIn

Link to ad library: LinkedIn Ad Library

LinkedIn is the place to B2B.

With more than 67 million companies and high-intentioned decision makers on LinkedIn [source], these may be what you’ve giving out to your competitors - blindly:

80% LinkedIn members who drive business decisions
LinkedIn audiences who have 2x the buying power of the average web audience
LinkedIn audience who are 6x more likely to convert‍

Below are some tips to win here:

Stripe ads displayed in LinkedIn Ad Library promoting sessions, subscription management, and revenue optimization with detailed descriptions in English, German, and French. — From this, we learn that Stripe ran Event Ads, Document Ads, Job Ads

‍Tip 1: Search by product keywords to quickly identify all competitors.

LinkedIn Ad detail for Stripe promoting 'The state of subscription and billing management,' with impressions segmented by country and key targeting information. — Stripe targeted countries like the UK, Netherlands, Ireland and India, with impressions around 5k to 10k

Tip 2: Check out their target audience by clicking the ad.

Generally speaking, the higher the impressions, the larger the allocated budget.

Of course, this depends on various factors like country, audience types, etc.

LinkedIn Ad promoting Stripe’s revenue acceleration event with details about topics covered, including payment strategies, compliance, and breakout workshops. — Discover effective methods for qualifying leads and generating interest with your target audience from competitors' LinkedIn's Conversational Ads.

Tip 3: What ad formats do they use?

The interesting ones to watch out for include:

Conversational Ads: You can see the exact message and sender.
Text Ads: Usually located on LinkedIn's left and right sidebars. Their pay-per-click model offers an appealing way to increase brand visibility, despite being less commonly used.

View their outreach template for Conversational Ads and the “mastermind” behind:

What’s the ad coverage?

Free to view for everyone, with/without LinkedIn account
Ads created on or after June 1, 2023
Ads remain in the Ad Library for one year after their last impression on LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s ad library offers a wealth of raw data, but turning it into actionable insights requires significant effort, especially so with multiple competitors to track

3. Meta (Facebook/Instagram)

Link to ad library: Facebook (Meta) Ad Library

With billions of people using Facebook, Instagram and other Meta technologies, the opportunity is huge - B2C or not.

Just like on LinkedIn, you can search by product keywords on Meta Ad Library (formerly Facebook Ad Library).

Pay close attention to:

Which ads survive the test of time?
How often do they refresh their creatives? The smaller the audience size, the more frequently you need to refresh to avoid ad fatigue.
Are they focusing on awareness, conversion, or retargeting campaigns?

Meta Ad Library showcasing Stripe ads launched in March 2024, emphasizing key messages like reducing cart abandonment and insights into no-code tools for startups.

What’s the ad coverage?

Free to view for everyone, with/without Facebook account
Active ads that are still running on Meta technologies
Ads about social issues, elections or politics that have run in the past seven years

4. TikTok

Link to ad library: TikTok Ad Library

TikTok houses the world’s most engaged audiences, where large and small businesses, agencies and creators can achieve big results.

Tips:

TikTok encourages ads that don't look like ads, great for targeting younger, content-hungry demographics.
You can see their performance AND find collaborating content creators to further understand your target segments' content preferences.
Pay attention to their hooks, video length, and content variety.

TikTok Ad Library search results displaying Chipotle and Hollieevelyn1 ads, including dates shown, unique users reached, and visual previews featuring food items. — At TikTok Ad Library, learn about the content and creators that have worked well for your competitiors.

TikTok ad summary showcasing targeting details such as gender, age, interests, and location, alongside a video preview of a Chipotle ad and performance metrics like CTR and unique users reached. — TikTok Ad Library gives a detailed audience breakdown.

Here's a treasure not many know about: Top Ad Library— a collection of the most successful ads.

Search for top ads by country, industry, objective, period, language, ad format, top N% likes
Find out the secret sauce for creatives too
Click the ad to view a detailed video analysis and interactive time analysis of ads for metrics like CTR, Conversion Rate, Clicks, and Conversions

Fun fact: Engagement rate on TikTok ads was found to be 835% higher than Meta [source]

What’s the ad coverage?

Free to view for everyone, with/without TikTok account
For TikTok Ad Library, all ads that are running on TikTok including ads that are not active presently or paused by the advertisers, targeted to users within the EEA, Switzerland, or the UK
Ads published on or after on October 1, 2022 and on, with at least 1 impression
For Top Ads, ads limited to those that have been authorized by advertisers and may not reflect all top-performing auction ads, including US

5. X (formerly known as Twitter)

Link to ad library: Ads Repository

Just like what you'd expect from X, their ad library operates differently from other platforms, requiring manual searches and downloading of CSV files.

As an alternative, you can manually scroll through the feed and capture relevant ad screenshots to track your competitors' tweets.

Given the time and effort, you may want to explore social listening tools such as Sprout Social. Social listening tools work by scanning social media conversations for trends and competitor mentions.

Trends report for Sprout Coffee Co. showing topics and hashtags frequently mentioned on Twitter, including 'weekend', 'coffee', and '#thanks', with detailed engagement metrics displayed in a clean dashboard format. — Sprout Social

Prefer to see all your competitors ads in one place, without the manual work?

We've shared the top 5 free tools to spy on your competitors' ads. While they are good starting points, navigating through these platforms can be very manual and time consuming. This is why we built the Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool to automate this process.

Interface of Kaya competitor ad intelligence tool showcasing ad platforms like Google, Meta, and LinkedIn, along with competitor ad examples and analytics for ad spend trends. — Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool saves you time and effort from competitive analysis. Get all your competitors' ads and insights you need, in one place.

Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool saves you time and effort from competitive analysis. Get all your competitors' ads and insights you need, in one place.

With the Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool, you can easily:

View all your competitors' ads across platforms
Gain insights about their ad spend, ICP and messaging
Get actionable recommendations on budget allocation and marketing angles your ICP loves

FAQ

How do competitor ads affect my campaign performance?: For paid search, increased competition will raise your cost-per-click. If your ad quality score is low, you'll rank lower and receive fewer clicks.

The impact is smaller for paid social, as you are unlikely to bid on the exact same audience.
How do I check my competitors' Google Ads performance?: You can check your competitor's Google Ads performance by looking up their URL or business name on ad analysis tools like Google's Ad Transparency Center. You can also use Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool for a comprehensive analysis.
How to gauge a competitor's budget?: There's no way to know for sure. While you can manually calculate it using tools like SEMRush, a better alternative would be Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence tool.

Conclusion

We've just uncovered the top 5 tools to spy on your competitor's ads (legally, of course!), from paid socials like LinkedIn, Meta (Facebook & Instagram), TikTok, X (Twitter) to paid search ads like Google.

10x your learning from peeking at your competitors’ strategies and outcomes, then fine-tune your marketing strategies.