How to see your competitors' Google ads, and get only the new ones every morning

Google Ads Transparency Center offers a public library of ads from various competitors. To monitor competitors' new ads, one can follow these steps.

First, search for a competitor's name or domain on adstransparency.google.com. This can include resellers and affiliates who are pointing ads at the site. Filtering by region, format, and date can help narrow down the results. However, this manual method becomes cumbersome when tracking multiple competitors or wanting to track changes over time.

The second step involves using an Apify actor called "Google Ads Transparency Library". This tool can search for ads by domain, advertiser name, ID, or keyword. It exports the ad's format, first and last shown dates, the number of days the ad was shown, the rendered ad image or YouTube URL, video ID and thumbnail for video ads, target domain, and the Transparency Center link.

To obtain this information, no Google account, API key, or cookies are required. The actor can be set to only deliver new ads and scheduled for daily runs.

The third step is to turn the actor into a monitor, which only charges for new ads. The cost is $0.012 per ad delivered ($12 for 1,000 ads). This ensures that previously delivered ads are not charged again and saves time by skipping long-running ads that show up every run. The monitor's message is concise, like "Competitor X launched 3 new video ads". This method avoids hand-filtering through long lists of ads and provides daily updates on new creatives.

While this approach does not provide information on competitor spend, bids, or targeted keywords, as Google does not publish these details, it is a useful tool for keeping an eye on competitors' new ad creatives. The information gleaned can help businesses review new offers, tag offers, hooks, and landing pages, sort ads by days shown to identify valuable ones, and protect brand reputation by spotting resellers or affiliates bidding on their domain.