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.

You can:

• Identify gaps in your strategies: Are they targeting audiences you haven't considered? Or using messaging that just clicks better?
• Beat the curve: Which ad formats and creative styles are getting traction in your industry? What new approaches to test?
• Identify their product focus: Discover which products your competitors are pushing and their strategies.
• Learn from others' wins and flops.

Prefer to do it yourself? Read on.

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)

1. How to See Competitors' Google Ads

Google Ads Transparency Center

There are many Google ads competitor analysis tools out there, but here's one for free.

At this site, you can see all ads within the Google ecosystem, including Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail.

Search by advertiser, website; then filter by topic, time, location, and format.

Think like a Google ads agency:

• What keywords and 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? This is particularly useful for experimental ads, as you can gauge if they are working for the advertisers.
• What are the ad variations?

For Search, you can see their keywords and ad copies using tools like 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.

Remember, Google ads competitor research is all about consistency - monitoring your competitors' strategies, optimizing yours, then maximize ROAS.

2. How to See Competitors' LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads Library

LinkedIn is the place to B2B.

With more than 67 million companies and high-intentioned decision makers on LinkedIn [source], you're missing out these if you haven't considered LinkedIn ads:

• 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

Think like a LinkedIn ads manager or agency:

Step 1. Search your competitor by company, advertiser name, or keyword. Filter another level by country and date.

Step 2. Check out their targeting criteria by country, language and audience.

Generally, the higher the impressions, the larger the allocated budget (subjected to other factors).

Step 3: Check out the different types of LinkedIn ads‍

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

3. How to See Competitors' Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads Library (Meta)

With billions of people using Facebook, Instagram and other Meta technologies, the opportunity is huge - B2C or not.

Facebook ads competitor analysis is made easier with its very own Facebook Ads Library, for free.

Just like on LinkedIn, search by product keywords or special elements like Black Friday Deals to learn from your competitors.

💡 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

4. How to See Competitors' TikTok Ads

TikTok Ads Library

TikTok houses the world’s most engaged audiences, where large and small businesses, agencies and creators can achieve big results.

Like other ad libraries, you can filter by country, ad type, date and keywords.

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

These insights give you an idea what type of content and TikTok creator for you to consider next.

🤫 Here's a treasure not many know about: TikTok Creative Center: 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
• What is a good CTR for TikTok ads? 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. How to See Competitors' X/Twitter Ads

Twitter Ads Library / X 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.

FAQ

How do competitor ads affect my campaign performance?

• For paid search, increased competition will raise your cost-per-click. If your ad quality score is low, you'll rank lower and receive fewer clicks.
• The impact is smaller for paid social, as you are unlikely to bid on the exact same audience.

How to gauge a competitor's budget?

• There's no way to know for sure. You can use tools like Semrush to estimate their monthly paid traffic and multiply it by your best CPC estimate.

Conclusion

We've just uncovered the top 5 tools to spy on your competitor's ads (legally, of course!), from paid socials like LinkedIn, Meta (Facebook & Instagram), TikTok, X (Twitter) to paid search ads like Google.

10x your learning from peeking at your competitors’ strategies and outcomes, then fine-tune your marketing strategies.

Get Your Competitor Research Done for Free

We built a competitor spying tool for ourselves, we think it would help you too. Get a FREE access to marketing competitive analysis report which covers:

• Insights into what’s good and bad about your competitors’ ads
• Actionable next steps on how YOU can win