How to Spy on your competitors using Google Ad Transparency page? (Updated for 2024)

What if i told you, you could spy on your competitor's google ads? Yep, Google adswords and Youtube ads! This is all possible because of the recently added Google Ad transparency page.

Read on..

What is the Google Ad transparency page

Google released the Ad Transparency page sometime in 2023. This is a special page specific to any brand that advertises on Google's platforms. For example, here's the Ad Transparency page for Spotify.

So what's special about this page? Here, you can see all Ads Spotify is running right now!

Amazing goldmine for Competitor research eh?

Not so fast! Google has made it very clunky to see these pages for brands out there. Unlike the Facebook Ad Library, your need to follow this 2 step process to find Ads for any brand out there.

How to spy on your competitors using the Google Ad Transparency page? (Updated method)

In the past, you needed to search for specific terms -> click on the arrow in the SERP -> Open their Ad library page.

You don't need to do these acrobatics anymore. Google has released the Ad transparency search page.

1) Open the Ad transparency page. You will be presented with a search box along with some filters.

2) Search for competitor Ads. I recommend clicking the country filter and setting "Show in x country" for precise targeting.If the advertiser doen't show up, it means they aren't verified by Google. Most advertisers should show up here.

For bigger brands, they will have heaps of adjacent brands taking up their place. Simply click on the advertiser with the most Ads.

This will show you all currently running Ads by the brand. Here's how it will look like:

This is great but you can further filter your search by clicking on the "All platforms" filter just above the search bar.

Here, you can further filter by search Ads, Youtube Ads, etc.

You can also use the format filter to view video Ads for instance. This filter is located on the top right corner of the Ad grid:

Unfortunately, unlike the Facebook Ad library, Google's Ad transparency page doesn't show us much information about the Ads

How to find insights from Ads running in the Ads transparency page?

Before I start this section, I'll make one thing very clear - the transparency page is very very basic compared to the Facebook Ad library.

Anyhow, here are some insights you can derive from the Ad transparency page:

How many Ads are your competitors running?

The Ad transparency page will give you a rought estimate into how many Ads an advertisor is running. This can give you a rough idea into how much budget they are throwing at Google vs other platforms.

What kind of Ads formats they are running?

By using the format filter, you can judge how much are your competitors invested in Youtube for instance. Or for search Ads. This can give you a rough idea into your competitor's Ad strategy.

Time for a quick plug - Use Swipekit's Chrome extensionto save Ads from the Google Ad transparency page. If its a Youtube Ad, Swipekit will save a reference to the Youtube Ad, or if its an image Ad, Swipekit will save the actual image.

PS: there is one way Swipekit can help you with the Google Transparency page. It can give you insights into the actual views a Youtube Ad has done. This can supercharge your Google Ad strategy.