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How marketers monitor competitor advertising campaigns automatically
Remember that quote about a wise man learning from the mistakes of others? That applies in marketing as it does in everyday life.
Monitoring your competitors’ ad campaigns is an effective way of knowing what and what not to do. But, how do I do this, and in a simple way?
You’re at the right place to answer this question. This guide explains why competitive monitoring is essential and how to automatically track rival ad campaigns.
Effective ways for marketers to track competitors’ ad campaigns
1. Use the Meta Ad Library
Facebook and Instagram accounts are used most for social media ad spending. Your competitors likely run ads on both platforms, and there’s an easy way to find these ads. The Meta Ad Library is a searchable database of all ads running on Facebook and Instagram (Meta owns both platforms).
You can enter your competitor’s name to view all their active ads, the ad content, and when the ad started running. You can also see the estimated audience size, target country, and language.
If your competitor is based in the U.K. or the European Union, their ads will be archived for a year after completion. This means you can view their previous ads alongside their active ones. The Meta Ad Library is free to use.
2. Use the Google Ads Transparency Center
Similar to the Meta Ads Library, Google provides a public database of ads run by businesses. On the Google Ads Transparency Center, you can enter your competitor’s name and see active Google search ads they’re running.
After entering a name, you’ll view every ad tied to the account, along with its visuals, format, and variations.
However, Google doesn’t display information about the target audience or the budget. You’ll rely only on the content to understand your competitor’s strategy and how to outrank them in search ads.
3. Email newsletters
Many brands run email newsletters to send promos to customers. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to your competitor’s email list and monitor their newsletter campaigns.
You’ll learn about their new products, discounts, collections, and innovations. Then, you’ll use this information to map out your strategy.
4. Use AdSpy
I’ve mentioned using the Meta Ad Library and Google Ads Transparency Center to monitor your rivals’ ads. AdSpy is like using both tools on steroids.
While Meta Ad Library and Google’s Transparency Center provide basic information and filtering options, AdSpy lets you go much deeper.
With AdSpy, you have advanced search options like how long the ad has run for, when a user last saw the ad, and the number of likes for each ad. You can also search through every comment left on the ad, a crucial feature for monitoring customer feedback.
Meta and Google’s ad libraries don’t provide detailed targeting information, but AdSpy makes up for it by analyzing each ad to determine its target location, gender, and age range. Its assessment isn't perfect, but it gives you a good hint about your competitor’s audience.
AdSpy includes both active and previous Facebook and Instagram ads, so you can dig into your competitor’s ad history and learn their marketing strategy.
5. Analyze with Semrush
Semrush is a popular SEO platform renowned for its sophisticated keyword analysis and competitive research features. You can use Semrush’s Advertising Research tool to peek into your competitor’s search ads.
Just enter your competitor’s domain and hit the search button– Semrush will analyze their Google Ads usage history and show their active ads. You can view your rival's target keywords and ad spend. This keyword analysis covers 20 languages in 100+ countries, providing ample information to outdo your competitors’ search ads.
6. Social media monitoring
To discover basic information about your competitor’s social media ads, you can check the social media platforms themselves.
For example, you can follow your rival’s favorite hashtag on Instagram and get updated whenever they post new content with that hashtag. You can also monitor specific keywords and mentions, then analyze your rival’s content over time.
7. Set Google Alerts
Google offers a free service that sends you email updates about new content matching your search query. With Google Alerts, you can set notifications for your rival’s brand name, then choose the sources, content region, language, and alert frequency.
In itself, Google Alerts isn’t a direct way to monitor your competitor’s ad campaigns. However, it provides an indirect way to monitor promotional videos and blogs created by your competitors.
After creating an alert, you can always return to edit its parameters, e.g., by changing the region from which to receive content alerts.
8. Use Panoramata
Panoramata is a marketing research tool widely used by e-commerce businesses —and for good reason.
With Panoramata, you don’t have to do much, like checking ad libraries, subscribing to newsletters, and receiving Google Alerts. You can simply enter your competitor’s name, and Panoramata will retrieve the competitor’s recent social media and search campaigns.
You can track multiple competitors, and each will have its own separate dashboard. Panoramata consults multiple sources to retrieve marketing data for you. Then, you can monitor each competitor’s dashboard and receive weekly summaries.
Panoramata isn’t only for monitoring social media and search campaigns. It also lets you monitor a competitor’s landing page, and weekly summaries will tell you if the page has been adjusted.
The drawback is that it’s a pricey tool, starting at $115 per month. The Advanced tier costs over $400 per month, making it only suitable for mid-sized to large businesses with sizable marketing budgets.
9. Use YouScan
YouScan is a prominent marketing research platform. It lets you benchmark your brand awareness against competitors, with detailed charts that compare their performance with yours.
To start, you'll choose the competitor you want to monitor. YouScan will retrieve the competitor's social media posts and analyze the themes, visual elements, and demographic data.
The analyzed data will be converted into charts to evaluate the rival’s marketing performance against yours. You can easily discover what needs improvement and how to outflank rivals.
10. Analyze with Perpexlity AI
Perplexity AI is not exactly a marketing research tool. It’s an AI-powered search engine that analyzes and feeds real-time information. It doubles as a research tool, where you’ll ask the chatbot to analyze your competitor’s marketing strategies.
For example, you can ask Perplexity AI, "Which advertising campaigns has [competitor's name] launched this month, and what are their results?" Perplexity will pull real-time data from social media, blogs, news articles, PDFs, and other available sources to give the best possible answer.
You can also ask Perpexlity to scan your rival’s press releases and product announcements, or to compare general industry sentiment about your brand compared to theirs. It’s an advanced AI-based chatbot, so feel free to ask creative questions.
Key advertising metrics to monitor about your competitors
1. Keywords
Keep tabs on the keywords your rivals are bidding on in their search campaigns.
These keywords let you know what they’re selling, how they pitch their products, and their ideal search audience. You can then bid on the same or similar keywords to capture your rival’s audience.
2. Messaging
Every brand uniquely pitches its product. You should pay attention to your competitors’ promotional tone, as you both target the same audience.
What offers do they promote? It could be bulk discounts, buy one get one free, or 20% off for new buyers. The ideal is to use a similar value proposition or make yours even better.
3. Visuals
Monitor which images and videos your competitors use. Generally, brands use high-quality images to drive conversions, but other characteristics differ.
Suppose you run a shoe brand: competitors may use professional model photos, while you use photos of your shoes alone, without models. If you observe lagging sales, you can switch to model photos like your rivals and see if it brings better results.
4. Ad volume and frequency
I mentioned several tools that let you monitor a rival’s ad volume, frequency, and length. These are key criteria that help you determine how to compete for the same target audience.
You can run ads with a similar budget and timeframe to your closest rivals —this helps your business thrive in competitive markets.
5. Engagement
Monitor the likes, comments, and shares of your competitors’ social media posts. These metrics tell you how positively customers respond to the posts.
The higher the engagement, the more effective your rival’s ad strategy is, constituting a signal to imitate this strategy. With tools like Panoramata and YouScan, monitoring competitors’ engagement is a simple task.
