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.

1. Google (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail)
2. LinkedIn
3. Meta (Facebook and Instagram)
4. TikTok
5. 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.

Prefer to do it yourself? Read on.

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.

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. Use Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool to see all your competitors' ads in one place. Find out how.

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:

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

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.

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. Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool goes beyond data aggregation, offering in-depth analysis and suggestions to inform your strategy. Find out more here.

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?

💡 Quiz time: What did we learn from scrolling through Stripe's ads?

• ‍Search Ads: Stripe mainly bids on brand and product-related keywords (such as Subscription, Payment Processing, Stripe Atlas, Tap to Pay, etc.).‍
• YouTube for Brand Awareness: They utilise YouTube to boost brand visibility.‍
• Paid Social (Facebook/LinkedIn): ‍
  • They focus on lead magnets (such as thought leadership, industry insights), events, and testimonials.
  • For a narrower audience, they also run messaging ads.
  • From this, we can deduce that they're using paid social for targeting a mid-to-upper market audience and for retargeting.

Differentiate (or steal) your competitors’ strategies by social media platforms and copywritings.

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

Chances are you've wasted hours hopping between platforms and tabs to analyze just one competitor's Meta Ads. Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool saves you time and effort by consolidating all your competitors' ads in one place. Learn more here.

4. TikTok

Link to ad library: TikTok Ads 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.

Click ad to view audience breakdown, including size, interest and location.

🤫 Here's a treasure not many know about: Top Ads 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, CVR, 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.

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.

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