Spy on competitors · Competitor Ad Monitoring

Competitor ad monitoring and competitor ad tracking

Checking a competitor's ads once a quarter means you learn about their new angle long after it started working. Google ad creative has no public archive: an ordinary commercial ad is visible while it runs and gone the moment the advertiser switches it off. Whatever you did not look at, you cannot go back for.

That is the whole case for monitoring rather than researching. AdEye keeps the ads it has already returned to you, with the date it first saw each one and the run length Google reports, so a creative you found in May is still on your board in August next to the one that replaced it. The comparison between those two is the finding, and it only exists if something recorded the first one.

Coverage is Google only, across Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube from the same advertiser record. There is no background alerting today and no combined multi-brand dashboard: you run a check, and the history is waiting when you do. CSV export is available on the paid plans if you keep records outside the tool.

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Public Google Ads Transparency data. Nothing behind a login.

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Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for that search. Google indexes ads by advertiser, so the brand's exact domain works best, for example nike.com.

Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for . That is an answer about the brand, not a problem with the search: they are not running Google ads that Google publishes, or they advertise under a different registered name.

We could not reach Google Ads Transparency just now, so this is not a result about that brand, we simply could not look. Please try again in a moment. This search has not been counted against your allowance.

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Live Google Ads Transparency data · Run length · Public data only

GOOGLE ADS TRANSPARENCY

Run length on every ad

AI-tagged hooks & angles

Why it works

What competitor ad monitoring gives you that a one-off check does not

A record, not a snapshot

The reason competitor ad tracking beats competitor ad research is that Google keeps nothing for you. Ordinary commercial ads are searchable while they run and disappear when they stop, with no archive and no history you can request later. So the value of a check is not what you learn that day, it is that the day exists at all. AdEye keeps the creatives it has surfaced for you with their first-seen dates, which turns a series of lookups into a timeline. Six months in you can say when a competitor dropped a price-led message and picked up a guarantee-led one, which is a fact, rather than guessing from memory.

Run length is the performance signal you get free

Google stamps every ad in its transparency data with how long it has been running, and that field does more work in a monitoring workflow than any modeled budget. Advertisers do not keep paying for creative that loses. An ad that has held for eight months has been tested against numbers you cannot see and it survived; one that appeared last Tuesday is a live experiment. When you track the same competitor over time, the ads whose run length keeps climbing are the ones worth studying, and the ones that vanish after three weeks tell you what they tried and abandoned.

Watch every surface, not just search text

Monitoring that only looks at text ads on a results page misses most of the account. The same advertiser record carries Shopping listings, Display banners and YouTube video together, and for ecommerce and lead generation those surfaces often hold more budget than Search. Performance Max creative shows up here too, which matters because it is structurally invisible to keyword-based tools: it never ran on a keyword list, so there is nothing for a scraper to infer from. Tracking a competitor across all four surfaces catches a repositioning that a search-only check would miss for months.

Change is the thing you are actually monitoring

The useful output of a tracking cadence is a diff, not a list. New creative appearing means a test has started. A long-running ad disappearing means something stopped working or the offer changed. A sudden burst of near-identical variants means they are iterating on an angle that showed promise. None of those readings need a spend estimate. They need two observations of the same advertiser separated by time, which is precisely what monitoring produces and a single research session cannot.

Honest limits, so you can plan around them

AdEye does not push notifications when a competitor changes their ads, and there is no dashboard that watches a list of brands in the background. You search one advertiser at a time and the history accumulates on your boards. Coverage is Google only: Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn each publish their own ad libraries and AdEye does not read them. Ads a competitor already stopped are unavailable to anyone, with two exceptions worth knowing, since political and social issue ads are retained for seven years and ads delivered in the European Economic Area are archived for a year after their last impression.

Side by side

Competitor ad monitoring: what you can track, and what nobody can

Checked August 2026 against what Google actually publishes. Where a free source or your own account is the better answer, this table says so.

What you want to track	Where it comes from	How reliable it is
Every ad a competitor runs today	Google Ads Transparency Center, or AdEye on top of it	Exact. It is the advertiser's own approved creative
How long each creative has run	Run length stamped on the ad by Google	Reported by Google. The best free performance proxy
When a new ad first appeared	First-seen dates recorded on your AdEye boards	As precise as your checking cadence. Nothing else keeps it
Shopping, Display and YouTube creative	The same advertiser record, all surfaces together	Exact, and usually missed by search-only tracking
Performance Max assets	The advertiser's transparency record	Visible here. Invisible to keyword-based trackers
A push alert the moment an ad changes	Not part of AdEye	No. You run checks; the history is kept between them
Ads a competitor stopped last month	Nowhere, unless the ad ran in the EEA or was political	Unavailable. Commercial ads leave no archive
Their budget and keyword list	Modeled by SERP-scraping tools, never read from the account	Directional at best. Not a fact for a client report
Their Meta or TikTok ads	Each platform's own ad library	Available there, not through AdEye. We cover Google only

What it surfaces

Every ad card carries the hook, angle and a working signal

You type a brand or a domain. AdEye pulls that advertiser's live public Google ads into one feed and AI-tags each creative on the paid plans, so you read the strategy and spot the long-running winners before you save a single one.

Check a competitor's live Google ads by brand or domain, on whatever cadence you set
Read the run length Google reports on every creative, not a modeled spend estimate
Keep first-seen dates so you can prove when a competitor changed their message
Catch new angles while they are still being tested, not after they are everywhere
Track Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube from one advertiser record
Spot Performance Max creative that keyword-based trackers cannot see at all
Compare several brands side by side on your boards to read a category shift
Export the tracked creative set to CSV on the paid plans for reporting outside the tool

GOOGLE Top performer

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Why AdEye

One feed, the AI read, the working signal in view

Not a stale doc full of screenshots. One query for a brand, the run length on every creative, and a swipe file worth reopening. Public ad-library data only.

Every Google ad at once

The Google Ads Transparency Center searched by brand or domain, so competitor ad research is one query instead of clicking through Google's own viewer.

The AI reads the why

Creatives are tagged with their hook, angle and format on the paid plans, a few per search and kept once read, and a working signal flags the long-runners, so you see why an ad works, not just what it ran.

A swipe file that stays current

Save winners to boards, each keeping its run length and a link back to the original creative on Google, so the file is still useful months later.

Good questions

Questions about competitor ad monitoring

Pick the handful of advertisers that actually affect your cost per acquisition, then look each one up on a set cadence rather than when you happen to think of it. Search by domain, read the run length on every creative, and save what you find so the next check has something to compare against. The comparison between two dated checks is the output that matters.

Yes. Google's Ads Transparency Center is the free primary source and works well for one-off lookups. Tools built on top of it, AdEye included, add search across advertisers, run-length sorting, saved boards with first-seen dates and CSV export on the paid plans, which is what turns occasional lookups into actual tracking.

It is the practice of checking what your competitors are advertising on a regular schedule and keeping a dated record, so you can see what changed rather than only what exists today. It differs from competitor research, which is a one-time review. Monitoring produces a timeline, and the timeline is where the useful signals live.

Yes, but only forward from when you start. Google publishes no archive of ordinary commercial ads, so nobody can reconstruct what a competitor ran last year. AdEye keeps every creative it has surfaced for you with the date it first saw it, which means the history you build is yours from day one and grows with each check.

Look at run length. Advertisers stop paying for creative that fails, so an ad that has been live for months has already passed a test you cannot see. Google reports that duration on each ad. It is not a conversion rate, but it is a real signal from the advertiser's own behaviour, and it beats any modeled spend figure.

AdEye does not send push alerts. What it does is keep first-seen dates on everything it has shown you, so a scheduled check surfaces what is new since last time. If instant alerting is a hard requirement, some display intelligence tools such as Adbeat include it on their higher tier.

It varies enormously by category and by how sophisticated the account is. Aggressive ecommerce and lead generation advertisers rotate creative weekly. Established brands can run the same message for a year. Rather than guessing, check monthly for a month or two and let the run lengths you observe tell you what cadence that specific competitor requires.

Enter their domain. Google's public advertiser records return the live creative across Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube in one place, each with how long it has been running. Searching by domain works directly; searching by brand name requires resolving the brand to an advertiser identifier first, which AdEye handles for you.

Display banners sit in the same advertiser record as the text ads, so they arrive in the same feed rather than needing a separate tool. If display and native inventory is your main focus and you need publisher placement data, a dedicated display intelligence tool covers more of that specific ground than we do.

You search one advertiser at a time, and you can save ads from as many brands as you like onto your boards to compare them side by side. There is no combined multi-brand dashboard and no background monitoring running while you are away. For most teams, a short list checked on a schedule beats a dashboard nobody opens.

Three to five, chosen from Auction Insights rather than from intuition. Auction Insights lives inside your own Google Ads account and reports which advertisers actually appeared in the same auctions as you, which is authoritative in a way no external list is. Monitoring twenty names you assembled by hand produces noise, not insight.

Usually not. Ordinary commercial ads vanish from public view when the advertiser stops them and Google keeps no retention window for them. Two exceptions exist: political and social issue ads are held for seven years, and any ad delivered in the European Economic Area is archived for a year after its last impression under the Digital Services Act.

The Ads Transparency Center is free and it is the same underlying data. It is built for single lookups, so tracking a list of competitors over months means repeating manual searches and keeping your own notes. AdEye has a one-time demo, two searches with no account and ten in total on a free account, with saved boards and export on the paid plans.

Yes, CSV export is available on the paid plans. Teams that report to clients tend to want the creative set out of the tool and into a deck or a spreadsheet, with the dates attached, so the record survives independently of any subscription.

Yes. These ads are published by Google in a public transparency service precisely so anyone can look them up, and the advertiser approved every one of them for public display. Watching what competitors say in public is ordinary market research. Copying their trademarked wording or brand assets into your own ads is a different question and not something we recommend.

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Public Google Ads Transparency data only. Nothing behind a login, no private data. Every CTA opens a quick signup, not a checkout.

Live Google Ads Transparency data · Run length · Public data only