A Beginner's Guide to Competitor Ads Analysis & 19 Tools for Success

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When you’re launching a new marketing campaign to promote your products, it’s easy to get lost in your ads. You might forget that your competitors are running ads, too—and their ads could offer valuable insights to improve your own. For instance, analyzing competitor ads can help you uncover new keywords, determine your competitors’ top-selling products, and even identify seasonal trends. This article will explore how to analyze competitor ads, TikTok Ecommerce Strategy and use what you find to enhance your next marketing campaign.

Shophunter’s Shopify sales tracker is a valuable tool that helps readers achieve their objectives. For example, they can effectively analyze competitor advertising strategies and leverage key tools to enhance their own marketing campaigns, ultimately driving better performance and gaining a competitive edge in the market. With this tool, you can quickly uncover your competitor’s top-selling products and seasonal trends to help you craft better-targeted ads for your next campaign.

What is Competitor Ads Analysis and Why Its Important

Competitor ads analysis thoroughly examines your competition's advertisements to promote their products or services. These ads can come in many formats, including:

Video ads

Social media posts

Traditional print or online ads

Monitoring these ads is essential for your business because it helps you understand how your competitors position themselves in the market. For example, examining your competitor's ad copy and details can reveal how much they invest in specific formats or ad categories. If a competitor heavily invests in video ads, it might indicate a trend or an area where you should consider increasing your focus to stay competitive.

Use Competitor Ads to Spot Weaknesses and Potential Opportunities

Analyzing competitors' ads allows you to spot gaps in their marketing approach, which you can exploit. This could be in targeting an audience they may have overlooked, positioning your products' unique value proposition compared to your competitor's, or improving upon their messaging and creative approach.

Competitor ads also uncover valuable insights into broader market trends and customer preferences. By analyzing the themes and messages used, you can detect shifts in consumer behavior and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Discover Direct and Indirect Competitors to Refine your Approach

Understanding direct vs. indirect competition through these ads allows you to refine your approach and position yourself more effectively. This competitor analysis enables you to tailor your advertising campaigns to better resonate with your target audience. Keeping tabs on these trends provides you with opportunities to gain market dominance by leveraging gaps or unmet needs in the market.

What’s the Ethical Way to Analyze Competitor Ads?

I get a lot of questions about ethics in marketing, particularly when it comes to this topic. But the truth is that there's nothing inherently wrong with spying on your competitor's ads or keeping tabs on their strategy, so long as you're not trying to hack into their accounts or copy them outright. You can guarantee they're doing it to you (or others just like you) now.

The Importance of Ethical Practices in Competitor Ad Analysis

That said, when you study competitor ad copy and details, you should aim to gain insights and inspiration, not to copy or imitate. Adhering to ethical practices helps you stay within legal boundaries and build a reputable brand.

Conversely, unethical practices can lead to significant risks. Copying specific ads or closely imitating competitors' ad strategies can result in legal issues, damage your brand’s reputation, and lead to disputes over intellectual property. Beyond these legal troubles, unethical behavior can alienate customers who value originality and integrity.

How Can I Use Competitor Ads to Inspire My Campaigns?

Instead of imitation, use competitor ads as a source of inspiration. Analyze their ad details to understand trends and successful tactics, then create unique advertising campaigns. For example, if a competitor's PPC campaigns are successful, investigate what works for them and adapt those elements to fit your ad budget and objectives.

Utilize helpful tools to track competitors' keywords and strategies, and incorporate similar elements into your campaigns to reflect your brand’s distinct voice and values. Overall, it’s important to remember to focus on inspiration rather than imitation. You still want to maintain a strong and positive brand identity. In this way, you can ethically leverage the insights gained from competitor ads to refine your strategies and effectively engage with your audience.

E-Commerce Advertising

Ecommerce Sales Strategy

Ecommerce Monitoring

Ecommerce Search Metrics

Competitive Product Analysis

Ecommerce Marketing Budget

Ecommerce Marketing Ideas

9 Sneaky Ways for Effective Competitors Ads Analysis

1. Use the Facebook Ads Library to Get Competitor Ad Insight

The Meta/Facebook Ads Library shows you all ads currently running across Meta technologies, including:

The ad copy and creative

Whether it’s active or pause

When it started running

Which Meta platforms it’s showing on

The ad category

The only downside here is that you must know the competitor’s name you’re searching for. Since there is no filtering, your keyword search results can be everywhere.

Things to pay attention to:

Does this ad have multiple variants?

If so, what are the variations?

Copy, creative, audience?

This can give you ideas for your own Facebook ad A/B testing.

Is this business running ads for other products or services?

If so, is there a theme or style that is more common than others?

What segment of their target audience is this ad appealing to?

2. Go to Their Website and Get Retargeted to Learn About Their Ads

Any business with a good digital advertising strategy will run retargeting ads. This means that after people visit their website, they will see ads for that business on other websites they visit and on social media.

Visit their website a few times

Click on different pages

Take specific actions

Then, look for social media and display ads for that business in subsequent days or weeks.

Things to pay attention to here:

Do you get served different ads based on your actions on the site?

What do the ads look like?

What positioning do they take?

How long did it take you to start seeing ads after you’ve visited their website?

Were the ads for the business general or specific to the product, service, or page you visited?

3. Use Facebook Itself to Analyze Competitor Ads

If your competitor retargets you with an ad on Facebook, you can do even more marketing competitive analysis by clicking on the ad itself.

Click the three dots in the upper right. You’ll then see options for “Why you saw this ad.” In the example below, Meta tells me I’m seeing this ad from impact.com because of the advertiser’s choices and my Facebook activity.

When I click on “Advertiser choices,” I learn that impact.com targets people who are part of a hashed (anonymized) list, are 25 and older, and are in the United States.

4. Use an SEO Tool to Analyze Competitor Ads

Comprehensive SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush offer competitive analysis capabilities that allow you to dive into the organic performance of your competitor’s sights and their paid performance, too.

For example, in Semrush, you can use “Domain overview” on the “Competitive analysis” tab to look at another site’s top paid keywords and even sample text ads. Click on “view details” for each keyword to see details on copy and position tracking over time. You can also look at estimated traffic volume and costs for paid keywords.

Things to look for here:

What keywords are they targeting?

Volume and cost per click of those keywords

How much are they spending on ads?

Which keywords are associated with which landing pages?

Be sure to visit the landing pages for those keywords and see what kind of:

Copy

Imagery

Positioning they’re using

5. Do a Google Search for Competitor Ads

If you don’t have an SEO tool, you can always search on Google for your competitor’s brand name or the service they provide. This will show you whether they’re running ads, and if they are, you’ll be able to see their ad copy and landing page, but you won’t get any of the keyword data and position tracking we mentioned above.

Things to look for here:

What angle do they take in their ad copy?

Are they bidding on branded keywords only or non-branded keywords as well?

Are other competitors bidding on their branded keywords?

6. Use the Google Ads Transparency Center for Competitor Ad Research

If you want a better look at what Google Ads your competitors are running, you can try Google’s Transparency Center. This is essentially their ads library. You can search for your competitors or other businesses to get inspiration for your campaigns for:

Text

Video

7. Try the TikTok Ads Library

Are your competitors running ads on TikTok? There’s one easy way to find out: the TikTok Ads Library. Within the TikTok Ads Library, you can find your competitors’ ads (if they’re running TikTok ads) or just browse other ads on the platform.

8. Use Competitive Intelligence Tools to Find Competitor Ads

The tools mentioned above are primarily SEO tools with additional capabilities for competitive intelligence, particularly in the PPC realm. There are also competitive intelligence tools that offer competitive ad intelligence, like Shophunter. Like with Semrush, you can use Shophunter to find your competitors’:

Keywords

View their search ad position

Estimate ad impressions

Traffic share from specific ads

Keyword data

Choosing the Right Competitor Analysis Tool for Your Goals

As for which tool is better, you’re getting mostly the same information from each one, so it’s more a matter of what else you want the tool to do. Semrush is your best bet if you want a tool focused on the following:

Backlinks

Organic performance

Similarweb is a good option if you’re focused more on:

Market research

Data enrichment

Customer journey mapping

9. Use Ad Intelligence Tools to Analyze Competitor Ads

And, of course, there are also plenty of tools dedicated to ad intelligence only. Take Adbeat, for example.

Type in a brand name, and with the free version, you can see:

Number of ads seen per month

Channel breakdown

Native
Direct
Programmatic

A breakdown of ad creative sizes and types

Which publisher sites the ads have appeared on

The longest-running ad

The longest-running page

You can also browse a gallery of the brand’s ads and view the ads:

Date
Type
Size

Ecommerce Ads

Ecommerce Advertising Platforms

Analytics Tools for Ecommerce

Google Ads for Ecommerce

Ecommerce Video Ads

How to Make TikTok Ads

Facebook Ads for Ecommerce

E-Commerce Social Media Advertising

Ecommerce Ad Intelligence

PPC Competitor Analysis Tools

Top 19 Tools for Monitoring Competitor Ads

1. Shophunter

ShopHunter's Shopify sales tracker offers a unique tool for ecom founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential. The platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores. This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on.

ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items, whether you're:

A dropshipper

A Shopify store owner

Someone looking to enter the e-commerce space

Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.

2. iSpionage

With iSpionage, you can enter a keyword or domain name in the search bar. From there, you’ll get competitor data and gain insights to help you understand your competition’s strategy. You can get up to seven years’ worth of PPC data! iSpionage compiles this data from three search engines:

Google

Bing

Yahoo

You’ll get data on your competitors and access to:

Keywords

Ad copy

Variations and more

How iSpionage Can Enhance Your PPC Strategy with Competitor Insights

When you use iSpionage, you will:

Learn from your competitors. With iSpionage, you can see who you compete with for Google Ads. This tool lets you see your competition’s approximate budget for PPC ads and their strategies. It allows you to learn from their successes to improve your campaigns.

Find better keywords: This tool will help you see your competitors’ campaign keywords. You’ll get a list of keywords you can sort by effectiveness to determine which keywords will be most profitable for your business.

Improve your click-through rate (CTR): With this tool, you can identify the profitable competitor ad copy. This information will help you create better ad copy to earn a higher CTR.

3. SpyFu

SpyFu is one of the most effective competitor analysis tools for PPC campaigns. This tool lets you learn from the ads your competitors have tried and tested over the years. It provides you with valuable insight into what works and what doesn’t. With this tool, you can get insights into your competitors’ keyword strategy and see any of your competitors’ keywords and ad spend history. It allows you to identify types of ad content that work so that you can integrate those strategies into your campaign.

Spyfu enables you to:

See your competition’s estimated monthly budget: With Spyfu’s software, you can see how much your competition spends on their ad campaigns. It allows you to see how you stack up against these companies and can help determine if you need to raise your ad budget.

Analyze every keyword your competition used: Spyfu allows you to go in-depth and learn about every keyword your competition ever bids on for ads. This information can help you better understand your competition’s strategy and inspire your campaign.

See how your competitor’s ad copy evolves: When you use this tool to monitor competitor ads, you can see how a company’s ad copy evolves for the same key terms. It provides insight into how competitors adapt their campaigns and can help you develop your campaign.

4. SEMrush

If you ask, “where are my competitors advertising,” you may need to use SEMrush to get answers. SEMrush provides information about both your search ad and display ad campaigns. With SEMrush, you can analyze your competitors’ budgets and keyword selections. You can see what your competition is doing and use that as inspiration to improve your campaigns.

SEMrush will enable you to:

Monitor competitor ad copy: With SEMrush, you can access ad copy examples from your competition. This information lets you see what calls to action (CTAs) your competitors use, the ad content, and more. It will help you create more effective ad copy.

Learn about new competitors: You may know some companies you’re competing against for ad space, but do you know all of them? With SEMrush, you will get a list of competitors and the number of common keywords they use. It will help you identify who’s using the exact keywords as you, so you know who you’re competing against for those key terms.

See what keywords your competition bids on: SEMrush lets you see which keywords catch your competitor’s eye. You’ll see which keywords they’re bidding on and how much they pay for each click. It’s a great way to help you shape your keyword strategy while tracking your competition.

5. WhatRunsWhere

If you want to monitor competitor ads, you can use WhatRunsWhere. This tool lets you stay current on what your competitors are doing with their advertising campaigns. You can see top ads in your niche and discover your competition’s strategies to win top ad spots.

WhatRunsWhere enables you to:

Identify winning campaigns: This tool lets you see what competitor ads perform best. This information will allow you to identify what parts of their campaigns work and determine how to incorporate similar elements.

Stay current on your competitor’s strategies: WhatRunsWhere allows you to stay on top of your competitor’s ad strategies. If something changes, you’ll know what they’re trying and can see if it’s working effectively.

Get accurate data: Get the latest data on your competitors’ advertising campaigns. This will ensure you have the most recent information at your fingertips to make the best decision for your business.

6. Moat

Moat allows you to look at different types of ad creatives like:

Mobile

Desktop

Direct

Programmatic ads

You can monitor competitor ads to see various kinds of creatives a brand is running now and ad creatives they’ve run in the past.

If you use Moat as one of your competitor analysis tools, you’ll be able to:

Search for ads by brands: Are you curious to see what types of ads your competition runs? With Moat, you can search for any brand and get insight into ads your competition ran recently.

Visualize data: When you have data on competitor ads, you can visualize that information with Moat. Moat presents ad data with charts to help you understand your competition’s ad performance.

Cross-platform performance: Moat lets you see ads from different platforms and devices. You can see competitor ads on:

Mobile
Apps
Desktops

7. Adbeat

Adbeat allows you to monitor competitor ads and see your competitors’ actions. You learn what type of ads they’re running and how they’re running them. You’ll get insight into their campaigns, from the messaging to the images.

With Adbeat, you’ll be able to:

Gain valuable insights to inspire your ad campaigns: You’ll have valuable data that helps you understand how your competitors run ads successfully. Adbeat lets you see information about:

Media buying strategies
Landing pages and more from your competition

Learn about different ad networks: When you use Adbeat, you will learn how competitors buy traffic from various ad networks. It will help you see if there are potential ad networks for your business to drive traffic.

Learn about your competition’s buying strategy: How does your competition buy ad space? With Adbeat, you get an in-depth look into your competition’s publishers, ad types, and more. This information lets you find new traffic sources and placements to grow your business.

Sadly, there aren't many options for viewing ads on X/Twitter, especially since their tool isn't a viable option.

You can go one of two routes if you're looking for more competitive intel on X:

Scroll through X and screenshot them manually

Use a social listening tool to scan for trends/competitors on the organic side

While the first option is off the table for most marketers due to time constraints, luckily, there are many tools available to help with organic social listening.

One of them is Sprout Social's Listening Suite. With Sprout, you can set up a list of filtered criteria to create your feed of X posts directly inside your dashboard. This works for finding posts about your niche or monitoring what people say about your competitor.

9. PowerAdSpy

PowerAdSpy is a comprehensive competitor ad analysis tool that provides valuable insights into your competitors’ ad strategies and campaigns. It can also help you gather information on various marketing aspects.

Let’s see how you can carry this out:

Identify all the features included in your competitor’s products and services.

Save this information in a competitor insight spreadsheet to conceive and evaluate how companies stack against one another.

Analyze to identify the main competitors in your niche industry.

Avoid excluding larger competitors completely; you can learn valuable lessons from their successes and failures.

10. Phlanx

This Instagram engagement calculator clues you on how active any account’s followers are. It is a tremendous resource for analyzing your competitor’s Instagram presence. Plus, it doubles as a way to determine whether an influencer has a legitimate following. Phlanx’s engagement ratio is calculated based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate at which followers interact with content (likes, comments, etc.).

A fun tool for checking out more prominent brands is Social Blade. It assesses follower counts on:

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube, among other services

Although often used to determine the popularity of celebrities and YouTubers, there are some interesting insights here for marketers. For example, their Twitter competitor analysis applies a “grade” based on their average number of retweets and likes. Perhaps most notably, Social Blade provides a day-by-day follower update and a live follower count. Another cool feature is the ability to stack brands’ social presences against each other.

12. Kompyte

Kompyte is a competitive intelligence tool that automatically pulls competitor updates into a single, easy-to-monitor dashboard. This includes:

Updates from their website

Review sites

Content

Social media

Job openings and more

Easily monitor competitor updates to keep a clear eye on what other brands in your industry are doing online. Plus, Kompyte helps put together sales battle cards based on your competitive findings that your team can use to close sales.

13. Crayon

Crayon is an artificial intelligence tool that can help with competitor analysis and competitive intelligence. It allows users to create a dashboard of automatically compiled and organized competitor updates so brands can always be aware of their competitor’s actions.

Crayon also has collaboration features, ensuring teams can manage and monitor competitive insights. Crayon also offers the ability to create sales battle cards and customizable reports and dashboards.

14. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo allows you to look at the top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors. The tool looks at a piece of content’s engagement on social sites and its total shares across the web. Not only does this clue you in on who’s killing it in terms of industry content but also it helps you identify potentially hot topics to explore yourself.

Whether you’re looking for movers and shakers in your industry or a new idea for a blog post, Buzzsumo provides you with definitive answers.

15. Similarweb

Similarweb is an insanely comprehensive tool for both content and SEO. The tools help you dig deep into your competitor’s content and where their traffic comes from. For example, you can determine a site’s referral traffic and where it sends visitors.

More importantly, for content marketers you see what topics visitors search for and what other relevant sites they visit.

16. Feedly

If you’re looking for a way to keep an eye on a competitor’s content without checking up on their blog constantly, look no further than Feedly. Feedly is a content aggregator that stores and organizes content as it’s published, including that of your competitors. This allows you to see hot topics covered by your competitors, all on one page.

17. Mailcharts

Email marketing is one of the most tedious channels for competitive analysis. Recognizing this, Mailcharts aggregates emails from competing campaigns to help influence your own. In addition to grabbing subject lines, Mailcharts pulls data such as send frequency and compares it to your business’ campaigns to see where your emails stand.

The tool compares your campaigns to their massive library of marketing emails to ensure you’re in tune with best practices. Think:

Timing

Frequency

Subject line length, etc.

Not only is Mailcharts a powerful competitor analysis tool, but its website offers a ton of email examples to draw inspiration. Pulling from some of the most extensive campaigns, you get a better idea of today’s top-performing emails.

18. Owletter

This tool automatically aggregates emails from competitors and organizes them into a simple, user-friendly dashboard. Owletter’s analytics spots changes in your competitors’ email frequency and likewise picks up on trends to help you optimize when you should send your emails.

This represents an efficient, data-driven alternative to keeping up a dummy email account to spy on competitors.

19. Owler

This industry analysis tool uses community data to curate data and content from startups relevant to your niche. Again, this tool is reserved for more prominent brands. You input brands to create your own custom dashboard of industry names to watch.

Best Ecommerce Analytics Tools

Facebook Ads Spy Tool

Ads Spy Tool Free

Ecommerce Marketing Tools

Ad Intelligence Tools

TikTok Ad Spy

Track Competitors Display Ads

Google Ads Spy

AutoDS Alternatives

Best TikTok Ads

AutoDS vs ZenDrop

Facebook Ad Library

Meta Ad Library

AdSpy

BigSpy

ShopHunter’s Shopify sales tracker offers an innovative tool for eCommerce founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential. The platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores.

This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on. ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items, whether you’re:

A dropshipper

A Shopify store owner

Someone looking to enter the eCommerce space

Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next ecommerce opportunity or to level up your current ecommerce store by learning from your competitors.