How to Spy on Competitor Ads Effectively

Most businesses on social media actively monitor their rivals. Everything is tracked — from landing pages to managing various websites. Thanks to this monitoring, you can develop, adjust, and launch advertising, create successful strategies, learn about customer sentiment, forecast trends, analyze failed cases, and more. 

Why Spy on Your Competitors’ Ads?

By timely and regularly spying on your rivals, you can gain discovery — not just one, while viewing their ads. It is important to do this to stay on trend and avoid promoting outdated products and services. You can also understand how their advertising differs from what the brand or company is launching. This is also done to avoid making the same mistakes and make the campaign better, creating more impactful strategies than your rivals. If you find a flaw in a competitor’s advertising, you can avoid that mistake yourself, thus protecting yourself from losing potential clients.

Advertising-Focused Competitive Analysis

To grow your business in the online space and develop the most effective SEO strategy, it’s necessary to know all sorts of data — traffic, and visibility of competitive web resources, as well as the key phrases they are targeting. Based on the analysis, you can develop promotional content and a successful ad. For example, if a rival is a small online shoe store with high traffic and the analysis shows that the website has good usability but ranks poorly in organic search due to weak optimization, active website optimization, contextual online advertising, and promotion on popular social media platforms should be implemented.

Social Media Ads

Social media is one of the key channels for ads, allowing advertiser to boost their ranking and become more recognizable in the modern market. Competitive analysis on Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms allows you to identify successful promotional content, target audiences, and trends. This, in turn, helps you effectively optimize your initiatives, improving their CTR, conversions, and profitability.

Use the Facebook (Meta) Ads Library

This is a powerful tool for analyzing competitors’ ads, used by marketers. It allows searching for ads by keywords, brands, and categories, studying formats, texts, and promotional content. This helps adapt custom advertising strategies, create more effective Facebook ads in the end, and identify popular approaches to advertisement in a specific niche, sector, or industry.

Use Facebook’s ad-targeting options

The Facebook social network offers detailed targeting parameters, allowing advertisers to adjust advertisements by demographics, interests, behavior, and content interaction. To monitor competitors, it is possible to find promising audiences, test different approaches, and improve ad effectiveness through personalization.

TikTok Ads Library

This solution helps publishers analyze promotion rivals, including various promotional content, formats, and targeting strategies. Studying popular advertisements allows adapting content to current innovations and platform trends, testing new approaches, and increasing audience engagement, making ads as effective as possible.

Search Engine Ads

An effective promotional strategy opens opportunities for businesses to attract targeted internet users through search engines. Analyzing rivals’ advertisements in Google help uncover trending ads, successful strategies, keywords, and tactics, which allows for optimizing one’s initiatives and increasing profitability.

Google Ads Transparency Center

A tool that allows analyzing rivals’ announcements in search, YouTube, and other well-known and popular Google services. Here, you can view active advertisements, and study their content, formats, and frequency of impressions. This helps identify trends, test new ideas, and improve the strategy for advertising initiatives.

View Ads on Google SERP

This is a quick way to study advertisement rivals. By entering targeted keyword queries, you can see which companies and brands use paid ads, which headlines and descriptions work best, and how they stand out among rivals. This helps optimize one’s announcements and improve their effectiveness.

Check paid keywords

Analyzing rivals’ paid keywords helps understand which queries bring traffic and conversions. Using special tools, such as Google Ads or third-party web services, allows identify high-value keywords, adjust one’s promotion strategy, and distribute ad spend more efficiently, minimizing costs and increasing ROI.

Methods to Spy on Your Competitors’ Advertising

By studying rivals, you can identify their promotion strategies, and assess optimization for each search engine. Thanks to current methods, there are chances to highlight and see the strengths and weaknesses of rivals, conduct market analysis, understand the target audience’s needs, improve user experience, and update marketing strategies. The market offers many luxurious, functional, and high-quality web tools. With their help, you can perform audits, analyses, and monitor advertisement rivals.

Analyzing Competitor Ads with Online Tools

Using specialized services helps you study rivals’ advertisements in detail, identify their strategies, and find growth points. Access to data on promotional content, formats, budgets, and key queries allows you to optimize the announcements and improve their effectiveness. Analyzing rivals’ advertisements provides an opportunity to better understand the market and adapt your strategy.

For example, Coca-Cola uses SEMrush to analyze web traffic and marketing strategies. According to SEMrush data, the website coca-cola.com ranks 5755th in the USA with 10.48 million visits in January 2025.

Adbeat: Ad Intelligence

This solution provides detailed information on paid advertisements from rivals, covering various channels and formats. It shows which announcements provide the best return, how the budget is distributed, and which trends prevail in the niche. With it, you can find successful creatives, test hypotheses, and adjust the strategy for greater efficiency.

SEMrush & Ahrefs for PPC Analysis

These services offer powerful tools for analyzing contextual advertisements from rivals, helping you determine which keywords are used, how the budget is allocated, and which announcements appear in search. They allow you to identify the strengths of others’ initiatives and use this data to improve your own PPC strategy, increasing conversions and reducing costs.

Moat for Display Ad Insights

This service specializes in analyzing banner and video advertisements, providing access to a wide range of creatives in different niches. It helps identify which visual solutions work best, which formats are most effective, and which brands or companies actively use display advertisements. These data also allow you to optimize any display ad, making it more attractive and competitive.

Ad Network Monitoring

Constant monitoring of media networks helps identify the most effective strategies and optimize expenses. Monitoring includes analyzing advertisement metrics, identifying anomalies, and evaluating traffic quality. It is important to track the alignment of promotion placements with the brand or company’s requirements, prevent fraud, and maintain a high level of audience engagement.

Identifying top-performing ad placements

Identifying the best publicity placements helps increase the profitability of initiatives and minimize unnecessary costs. Analyzing click-through rates, conversion rates, and user behavior helps identify the most effective positions. It is also important to consider the platform’s context and audience to ensure the placement aligns with the brand or company’s goals and provides the best return.

Analyzing publisher relationships

This relevant action helps optimize working with partners and improve publicity traffic quality. Assessing reliability, audience fit, and contract compliance helps identify promising collaborations. It is important to regularly review working conditions, test new platforms, and exclude sources with low effectiveness.

Landing Page Analysis

The analysis of the landing page helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the design, content, and user experience. The structure, navigation ease, loading speed, and alignment with audience expectations are evaluated. This allows for optimizing conversions and improving the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Creative & CTA Evaluation

This evaluation aims to determine their impact on users. The visual elements, text messages, positioning, and appeal of calls to action are analyzed. Optimizing these elements helps to increase engagement, improve the user experience, and boost conversions.

A/B Testing Insights

Split testing allows comparing different versions of the landing page, and identifying the most effective design, content, and CTA elements. Analyzing the results helps make informed decisions, enhancing user interaction and increasing conversion. The methodology is data-driven, making optimization more precise and effective. Split testing can also help find ad copy and eliminate duplication that could harm performance.

Newsletter Subscriptions

Attracting your audience should be done directly through dedicated newsletters. By offering personalized content, businesses can increase engagement, boost conversions, and build a loyal subscriber base. With strategic solutions via email, a company or brand will keep its audience informed and maintain a connection with the brand, ensuring steady growth.

Email Marketing Insights

This is a powerful tool for increasing conversions. By analyzing open rates, click-through rates, and segmentation strategies, businesses can fine-tune their ad to target the right audience effectively. Continuous optimization leads to higher engagement and, ultimately, a better return on investment in the business.

Content & Promotion Analysis

It is important to analyze the content on the business’s website and advertisement strategies to understand what resonates with the target audience. Performance audits help identify successful tactics and areas for improvement. By adjusting their approach based on the obtained data, the brand or company can maximize the impact of its content and achieve better marketing results.

How to Monitor Competitor Advertising Over Time

To quickly review the landing pages of rivals, you can check them in Serpstat or another reliable service using the necessary keyword or for a specific website. The report will provide each brand or company with a list of websites, the number of announcements, and keywords through which the ad is displayed.

Automated Alerts

These notifications are set up to inform internet users about important events or changes. Alerts can be configured to track specific metrics, such as website traffic, conversion rates, or stock levels. They save time by providing real-time updates and helping businesses make active decisions.

Tracking Seasonal Trends

This strategy includes analyzing consumer behavior patterns based on the season. By tracking demand fluctuations, companies or brands can adjust their marketing strategies, stock levels, and relevant promotional campaigns to take advantage of peak periods. This understanding helps optimize web resources and maximize sales opportunities.

Ethical Considerations When Spying on Competitor Ads

When analyzing rival advertisements, it is important to distinguish between ethical rival intelligence and illegal activities. Gathering information from publicly available data is fine, but directly copying strategies or infringing intellectual property rights can harm a business’s reputation and violate rules in general.

What’s Legal and Ethical in Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence involves collecting publicly available information to improve business strategies. Analyzing market trends, advertisements, and consumer behavior is legal. However, illegally obtaining confidential data or violating privacy policies can lead to legal consequences and ethical dilemmas.

Understanding fair use of publicly available data

Publicly available data, such as advertisements on websites or social media, is open for analysis. Observing and learning from these materials is fair if the information is used for strategic purposes and not for illegal activities such as copying or improper use of a brand’s or company’s assets.

Avoiding Direct Copying and Creating Unique Strategies

While learning from rivals is useful, it is crucial to avoid copying or duplicating their advertisement or strategies. Instead, it is better to analyze their tactics and adapt them to your unique needs by adding originality and creativity. Developing individual initiatives ensures compliance with ethical standards while maintaining the rivals’ competitive advantage.

Learning from competitors while maintaining originality

You can draw inspiration from rivals, but not by copying. Analyzing their messages, designs, and offerings is allowed, but it is essential to ensure that the business strategies align with the brand’s or company’s identity and goals. This approach helps differentiate the advertiser while staying within legal and ethical boundaries.