Spy on competitors · PPC Competitor Analysis

PPC competitor analysis tools: spy on competitors' PPC ads

PPC competitor analysis usually stalls in the same place. You know who keeps outranking you, because Auction Insights names them. What Auction Insights never shows you is a single ad. So the analysis turns into incognito searches on your own keywords, screenshotting whatever happens to serve that minute, and hoping you caught the good one.

AdEye pulls a named advertiser out of the Google Ads Transparency Center into one searchable feed. Search by brand name or by domain and you get their Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube creative together, with how long each one has been running, so a three-month workhorse is obvious sitting next to a two-day test.

What you will not find here is a keyword list or a spend estimate. Google publishes neither, and the figures other tools quote for both are modeled from scraped search results rather than read from anyone's account. This page is honest about that line, because knowing which half of a competitive picture is evidence and which half is inference is most of the job.

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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 a PPC competitor analysis can actually establish

Auction Insights names them, AdEye shows you the ads

These two tools do different jobs and the order matters. Auction Insights lives inside your own Google Ads account, it is free, and it is the only authoritative answer to who you actually overlap with in the auction. It reports impression share and overlap rate, and it stops there. Take the advertiser names it hands you, drop them into AdEye, and you get the creative behind the names: the headlines, the descriptions, the offers, the landing pages they point at.

Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube in one record

A paid search competitor is rarely only on Search. The same advertiser is usually running Shopping listings, display banners and YouTube pre-roll off the same budget and the same positioning. Google files all of it under one advertiser record, so AdEye returns the full set together rather than making you check four surfaces separately. Reading them side by side is how you spot the message they lead with everywhere versus the one they only test.

Run length is the signal that survives without spend data

Every creative carries how long it has been live. That single number does most of the work a spend estimate pretends to do. An ad that has run continuously for four months is one somebody is watching and refusing to turn off. An ad that appeared last Tuesday is a test, and copying it tells you nothing yet. Sort a competitor's feed by run length and their proven messaging separates itself from their experiments without anyone guessing at a dollar figure.

Keyword and spend numbers are modeled, not reported

This is the part of PPC competitive intelligence buyers get wrong most often. No tool reads a competitor's Google Ads account. Vendors that publish keyword lists, CPCs and monthly spend build them by scraping search results at scale and inferring backwards, which makes them a directional sample rather than a measurement. They are genuinely useful for finding terms you had not considered. They are not evidence, they should never go in a client report as fact, and AdEye does not sell them to you as either.

Ordinary commercial ads are never archived

The Transparency Center shows ads while they run. Once an advertiser stops a campaign, an ordinary commercial ad leaves no public record at all. There are two exceptions worth knowing: political and social-issue ads are kept for seven years with spend and impression ranges, and any ad delivered in the EU is archived for a year after its last impression under the Digital Services Act. That second one is a genuine loophole. A US brand that also runs campaigns in Germany leaves a year of otherwise unreachable inactive creative behind.

Side by side

What is evidence in a PPC competitor analysis, and what is a guess

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

What you want to know	Where it really comes from	How far you can trust it
Which advertisers you compete against in the auction	Auction Insights, inside your own Google Ads account	Authoritative. Google reports it from the auction. Start here
The exact ad copy a competitor is running today	Ads Transparency Center, or AdEye on top of it	Authoritative. It is the advertiser's own approved creative
How long a given creative has been live	Run length on each ad in the Transparency Center	Reported by Google. The most useful signal you get free
Their Shopping listings and YouTube video ads	The same advertiser record, all surfaces together	Authoritative, and routinely missed by Search-only reviews
Which keywords a competitor bids on	Modeled by SERP-scraping tools such as SpyFu or Semrush	Directional only. Useful for ideas, never a fact in a report
How much a competitor spends per month	Estimated from modeled keywords times modeled CPC	An estimate built on an estimate. Do not quote it to a client
Ads a competitor stopped running last month	Nowhere, unless the ad ran in the EU or was political	Unavailable. Commercial ads leave no archive when they stop
What their Meta or TikTok campaigns look like	Each platform's own ad library	Available, but 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.

Turn Auction Insights advertiser names into their actual ad copy
Search a paid search competitor by brand name or by domain
Read Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube creative in one feed
Sort by run length to separate proven ads from live tests
Track the offers and price points rivals lead with this quarter
Save competitor creative to boards before campaigns come down
Brief a client or a copywriter with real ads instead of screenshots
Public ad-library data only, nothing scraped or inferred

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 ppc competitor analysis

Open Auction Insights in your own Google Ads account to get the list of advertisers you actually overlap with. Then pull each of those advertisers' live ads to read their headlines, offers and landing pages. Finish by noting which creative has been running longest, because run length tells you what is working for them better than any spend estimate will.

Split the job in two. First find who you actually compete with: Auction Insights inside your Google Ads account names the advertisers sharing your Search, Shopping and Performance Max auctions. Then read what each one says by searching its domain in the Google Ads Transparency Center, or in AdEye, which pulls every live Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube ad for that advertiser into one feed with run length. Keyword and spend numbers from SERP-scraping tools are estimates, so treat them as ideas, not facts.

Auction Insights is the direct answer and it is free. It sits inside your Google Ads account and reports the domains that appeared in the same auctions as you, along with impression share and overlap rate. Your PPC competitors are frequently not your business competitors, which is why guessing at the list rather than pulling it wastes budget.

Yes. Google runs a public Ads Transparency Center where you can look up any verified advertiser and see the ads they are currently running, including Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube. It is free and it needs no account. AdEye sits on top of it to make the results searchable, sortable by run length and saveable to boards.

You cannot see them directly. Google does not publish any advertiser's keyword list, and no tool reads a competitor's account. Tools that show keyword lists build them by scraping search results at scale and inferring which terms triggered which ads. Treat that as a source of ideas, not as a measurement of what anyone actually bids on.

Two of them, and they are the ones to start with. Auction Insights in your Google Ads account tells you who you compete against, and the Google Ads Transparency Center shows you their live creative. Both are free and both are authoritative. Paid tools are worth money when you need to search many advertisers quickly, sort by run length or keep a saved record.

It depends which half of the picture you need. For modeled keyword and CPC history, SpyFu and Semrush have the deepest archives. For enterprise paid search intelligence at scale, Adthena is the category leader. For reading a named competitor's live Google creative across every surface without paying enterprise rates, that is what AdEye does.

The range is wide. SpyFu runs $39, $119 and $249 a month, or from $29 billed annually. Adthena publishes $399 a month for ChatGPT Ads Intelligence and quotes its main market-view products custom, aimed at brands spending $500,000 or more a year on Google Ads. AdEye runs $39, $99 and $299 a month by search volume, with free searches to try it.

No, not as a fact. Google publishes spend only for political and social-issue advertising, and even there as ranges. Every commercial spend figure you have seen quoted is a model: estimated keywords multiplied by estimated cost per click. It can be directionally right and it can also be wrong by an order of magnitude.

Auction Insights is a report inside your Google Ads account that lists the other domains that entered the same auctions as you. It shows impression share, overlap rate, position above rate and top-of-page rate. It is the only authoritative source for who your paid search competitors are, and it deliberately shows you no creative at all.

Accurate enough to generate ideas, not accurate enough to defend in a meeting. These figures come from scraping search results and inferring backwards, so coverage is best on high-volume commercial terms and thin everywhere else. Brand campaigns, Performance Max and anything running in a narrow geography tend to be badly under-counted.

Yes. A single advertiser record covers Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube video ads together, which is why looking an advertiser up beats checking each surface separately. Shopping listings show the product imagery and the price point a rival is leading with, which is often the fastest read on their positioning.

Google publishes no retention window for ordinary commercial ads, and they disappear once the advertiser stops running them. The widely quoted thirty-day figure refers to something else entirely, the advertiser ad-disclosure page. Political and social-issue ads are kept seven years, and ads delivered in the EU are held a year after their last impression.

Partly. The Transparency Center is public, so you can read any verified advertiser's live creative with no account at all. What you lose is Auction Insights, which needs your own campaigns running to generate the competitor list. Without it you are guessing at who to look up, so agencies usually pull the list from the client's account first.

Monthly is enough for most accounts, with a check before any major launch or seasonal push. The reason to keep a cadence rather than doing it once is that commercial ads are not archived: a competitor's Black Friday creative exists only while it runs. Miss the window and there is no record left to go back to.

No. AdEye searches the Google Ads Transparency Center only, which covers Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube. Meta and TikTok publish their own free ad libraries and you should use those directly for social creative. We would rather say that plainly than sell you coverage we do not have.

PPC analysis looks at what a rival is paying to say right now, and the evidence disappears when they stop paying. SEO analysis looks at pages and links that persist and can be crawled at any time. That impermanence is why paid search work rewards a regular capture habit in a way organic research does not.

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See what your competitors are running today

Type any brand and watch their live ads stream into one feed, AI-tagged with the hook, angle and what is actually working.

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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