How to Build a Competitor Ad Report (Agency Template)

A competitor ad report turns public ad-library data into a decision. A good one covers three to five named competitors, pulls their live ads from Meta, Google, TikTok and YouTube, and for each reports ad volume, run length, variation count, platform mix, and the repeated hooks and angles. It leaves out invented spend figures, because no public library reports spend for commercial ads. The point of the report is not a data dump; it is a short list of proven angles your client should test next. Last updated July 2026.

Agencies and in-house teams build competitor ad reports to answer one question for a stakeholder: what is the competition running, and what should we do about it? The bad version is 40 screenshots with no conclusion. The good version fits on a few slides and ends in recommendations. Here is the structure that works, what to include, and what to cut.

What is a competitor ad report?

A competitor ad report is a structured summary of the ads your competitors are running, built from public ad-library data, that ends in recommendations. It is not a list of every ad a rival has ever run, and it is not a performance dashboard of your own account, which is the job creative-reporting tools like Motion do. It is a filtered read of what your rivals are funding now, why it appears to work, and where the gap or opportunity is for your brand. The audience is usually a client or an executive who will not open the ad libraries themselves, so the report has to do the interpreting for them.

What should a competitor ad report include?

Keep it to the sections that drive a decision:

• Competitor set: three to five named rivals, chosen deliberately, not everyone in the category.
• Activity snapshot: how many live ads each runs and on which platforms, a quick read on who is investing.
• Proven creative: the ads with the longest run length, the ones a competitor keeps paying to serve.
• Angles and hooks: the messages and offers that repeat across a rival's account.
• Formats and platforms: where each competitor concentrates, static versus video, Meta versus YouTube.
• Gaps and opportunities: angles no one is running, or a platform the category is ignoring.
• Recommendations: two to four specific tests your brand should run next.

Everything in the report should ladder up to that last section. If a chart does not change a recommendation, cut it.

What should you leave out of a competitor ad report?

Leave out spend estimates. This is the most common way these reports lose credibility. No public ad library reports spend, impressions, or ROI for commercial ads, so any dollar figure in the report is a modeled guess, often off by multiples. If a stakeholder asks for competitor budgets, explain what the data actually supports: you can show what a competitor is funding through run length and variation count, which is the question the budget number was standing in for. Also cut the exhaustive screenshot appendix. Nobody reads it, and it buries the three ads that matter.

How to build the report step by step

1. Pick the competitor set. Choose three to five brands the client actually competes with for the same buyer, not the biggest names in the category.
2. Pull every live ad. For each competitor, extract their ads from the Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, TikTok, and YouTube.
3. Sort by run length. The long-runners at the top are the proven winners. Start your read there.
4. Tag the angles. Group the top ads by hook and offer so patterns become visible across competitors.
5. Map the gaps. Note which angles are crowded and which are empty. The empty ones are opportunities.
6. Write the recommendations. Turn the read into two to four specific creative tests, each tied to an angle you saw working.

How often should you refresh a competitor ad report?

Monthly for most brands, weekly for fast-moving categories like DTC and mobile apps. Ads rotate constantly, so a one-time report ages quickly, and the value compounds when you can show change over time: new launches, retired ads, and growing variation counts. The practical move is to run ongoing competitor ad monitoring so the underlying feed is always current, then snapshot it into a report on your reporting cadence. That way the report is a summary of a live view, not a scramble the night before a client call.

Do the pull in one place

The slow part of building these reports is pulling ads from four separate libraries and keeping the variations together. A competitor ads extractor collapses that into one search: AdEye pulls a brand's live public ads from Meta, Google, TikTok, and YouTube into a single feed, tagged by hook and format and sorted by run length, so the proven creative is already at the top when you start writing. If you are producing these across a roster, an ad spy tool for agencies keeps each client's competitor set tracked separately. For the report itself, if you would rather assemble it as slides your client can skim, an AI presentation maker that turns documents into decks can take your notes and screenshots and lay them out cleanly, so your time goes to the analysis rather than the formatting.

The short version

A competitor ad report should name three to five rivals, pull their live ads from all four platforms, and report volume, run length, variation count, platform mix, and repeated angles, ending in two to four concrete tests. Leave out invented spend numbers and the screenshot appendix. Refresh monthly, or weekly for fast categories. The value is not the data; it is the short list of proven angles it points your client toward. To learn how to read each ad you include, see how to analyze competitor ads, and to gather them without opening four tabs per brand, run a single ad library search across all of them.