Learn how to find competitor ads with top tools and strategies in 2024. Discover free and paid options to analyze and enhance your ad campaigns.
Hailey Chong
June 24, 2024
Why would you want to find competitor ads instead of just focusing on yours? Your competitors most likely target the same audience as you. Hence, knowing their paid ads strategy can help inform yours.
Since 2020, brands have spent over $165 billion on digital ads in the US. There are many benefits to paid ads as a startup. You can reach your precise audience, increase brand awareness, and boost your measurable ROI.
In this post, we’ll share about:
Kaya's Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool: The Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool eliminates the manual work to find, compile and analyze your competitors’ ads. It aggregates their ads across different platforms, like Google ads, Meta ads, LinkedIn ads and more in one place.
You'll be able to get data that's hardly accessible by public research, such as competitor’s ad activities by channel, ad spend, format and effort. The best part? It also gives you channel recommendations and tailors suggestions to your audience.
Curious what your competitors are up to with their paid ads strategy?
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AdEspresso: Hootsuite’s AdEspresso offers an Ad Gallery that allows you to search for competitor ads. The tool offers many filters to help narrow your search. It also sees all your competitors’ ads and user engagement, showing which are most effective.
SEMrush: With SEMrush, you can generate a detailed list of all the keywords your competitors have in common. You can find where your competitors are advertising and information on their search and display ad campaigns. You can also use it to see keywords your competitors bid on.
Spyfu: Spyfu provides insight and recommendations on effective and ineffective ads based on your competitors’ experiences. With Spyfu, you’ll learn every keyword your competitors used, the evolution of their ad copy, and their advertising expenditures.
AdBeat: With Adbeat, you can learn your competitor’s entire ad strategy. This tool shows what your competition is doing– their ad formats, such as display, video, and native ads and how they use them. Adbeat also shows how your competitors buy ad space and traffic from ad networks.
As a startup, your tight budget may limit you from using paid tools. Here are free tools for finding competitor ads.
Facebook Ad Library: You only need a Facebook account to use this Meta ad library, and you can search by keywords or advertisers. It works for ads advertised across Meta’s platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network etc. You can also learn the age of the ad and how many versions are running on the platform. However, you can only see business ads that are still running—Meta removes old ads from the library.
Google Ad Transparency Center: Google’s ad transparency center will help you find competitor display ads used in the past year. You can search ads using the website or advertiser name as keywords and filter the search to make them more specific. It is quite popular for advertising creative analysis.
LinkedIn Ad Library: The LinkedIn Ad Library is a free tool for finding competing ads on LinkedIn. It allows you to search competitor ads using ad keywords or the advertisers' names. The tools filter can also help you narrow your search to find and analyze only the ads you want.
TikTok Creative Center: The Creative Center is an alternative to TikTok’s Ad Library. It reveals important ad metrics like clicks, CTV, conversions, and CTR. You can use this free tool without a TikTok account, but you’ll only see ads approved by advertisers to appear on the creative center.
You may wonder how to use these tools. We created a practical guide to help you do that.
Google Ads' competitor analysis reveals all ads that are currently running on Google properties and those that were delivered about 30 days ago.
Here is how to spy on competitor ads on Google:
After finding your competitors’ ads, use the above steps to analyze their PPC strategies. Your analysis should seek to answer questions like:
Following these steps and answering these questions give you insights that you can incorporate into your ads strategy.
Follow the below six steps to find competitor ads on Facebook using the Meta Ad Library
While spying on your competitors' Meta ads, try to identify ad creatives and targeting strategies employed in their campaigns. Your competitors could be exploring any of these targeting strategies:
You can use the Meta Ads library to analyze Instagram ads. Follow the steps in the previous section and use the right filters to find competing ads on Instagram.
Instagram insights is another efficient tool that you can use for ad analysis along with the Meta ads library. However, it does not show your competitor’s ads, and it is only available for business accounts via mobile app. Using both, you can measure your ad performance against your competitors.
To open Instagram Insights on your account, tap the Insights action button on your Instagram profile page. Hubspot has a great article on Instagram Insights, read more here.
The LinkedIn Ad Library reveals all your competitors’ ads and their performance metrics. Open the Ads Library directly on LinkedIn and search a keyword to find competitor ads from this library.
You can also find a competitor’s ads on LinkedIn from their profile. Here are the steps to do it.
Here, you will see all your competitor’s ads but not all the metrics as you would in the Library.
You’ll find detailed insights for analyzing your competitors’ ads from the TikTok Creative Center. You can access the Creative Center without a TikTok Account like the Ad Library. Simply open this center on a browser and start searching for ads.
You’ll find performance and keyword insights, as well as other ad information, for a comparative analysis. The TikTok Creative Center has several tabs, including top, trending, and hot ads. This helps you understand the current ad trends and popular ad formats in your niche.
By now, you should be familiar with the basics of finding competitor ads online, but you can take things further to extract even more insights. Here are some practical tips to help you do that.
Analyzing your competitors' ad copy is a basic task in competitor ad analysis. Your analysis aims to find what makes the ad copy compelling.
Here are some key elements to analyze in a competitor’s ad copy:
There are several tools to help you analyze these elements in ad copies, such as:
While single-ad analysis is excellent, ad tracking and monitoring are even better. Tracking and monitoring is a comprehensive and ongoing approach to ad analysis. It allows you to analyze the different ad creatives your competitors employ.
This analysis can help you discern your competitors’ entire ad strategy. However, tracking and monitoring analysis require online tools for effective implementation.
Below are some recommended tools for this comprehensive ad analysis:
A competitor ad analysis aims to find competitor ads and learn their strengths and weaknesses. It also lets you find opportunities to leverage.
This section covers two ways to evaluate your competitor’s advertising strategies.
The pay-per-click or PPC competitor analysis helps assess your search engine marketing approaches against your rivals.
Here are the steps in PPC competitor analysis when planning your ad campaigns:
Ad Intelligence, a social media ad monitoring tool, provides insights into your advertising and content strategy. With this, you can keep an eye on social channels and the conversations that take place on them. It interprets ad information beyond basic engagement.
Competitor ad analysis is continuous. For this reason, you must constantly keep up to avoid lagging and falling short in your campaigns. So, there are multiple practical tips to keep you going.
Here are a few options for evaluating ad performance:
Here is an extra resource we created to help you analyze competitor ads on social media.
You must also keep up with the latest trends and innovations. Here are the most important to consider:
Create alerts to track competitors and monitor their campaigns. Here are the tips on how to set these competitor ad alerts:
Combining the information you gather with your campaign strategy can get you results. Here are multiple practices to consider.
Leveraging the information from competitor ads analysis is as important as the analysis itself. Here are tips on how to use these insights adequately:
You can use the data from competitor ad analysis to tweak and enhance your strategy. Here is how to do it.
Kaya’s Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool makes the difference for struggling startups. Here are some cases.
The team's expertise, combined with their extensive competitive research, Kaya delivered the right insights that led to ad success for Safely Finance. Their Google ads conversion grew by 651%, offer costs dropped by 80%, and key conversion points increased by 3 times.
By trusting Kaya and delegating, we regained time to spend understanding our users.
Kaya's proprietary AI tool delivered the analytics and insights that enabled Stateel to scale its business. The team also delivered regular updates via Slack and email, helping Stateel save time and keep up with the numbers that matter.
The analytics and insights I get from Kaya have been such a time saver, and helped cut through the chaff and show us the numbers that mattered and what they meant. It was very helpful in guiding us on what to focus on while scaling up our business.
Read more from startup founders to see how Kaya is making a difference for them.
Evaluating your competitor’s ad strategy allows you to know their strengths and weaknesses. That way, you can follow what works and avoid the ones that do not.
You can automate that process using Kaya’s Competitor Ad Intelligence Tool. It reveals where your competitors are running ads and what they are spending. It also offers you insights on what channels to target, the ideal customers, and tailored suggestions for your marketing. Here's a free report to get started - No string attached.
Remember that ads are an investment, and you want to get the maximum ROI possible. You need the help of experts to get you the required results.
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