5 Best Ad Transparency Tools For Competitor Analysis

Choosing the right paid advertising strategy for your business is not easy. Are you using the right messaging? What visuals should you use? What is the most appropriate targeting? What do your customers respond to?

It’s a bit much to decide off the bat, but there are easy processes to follow and tools that can help you come up with some excellent starting points and guidance to follow.

How to prepare your paid advertising strategy

One way to start planning is to look at what your competitors are doing. Focus on businesses with similar audiences and products and assess how they approach their advertising.

It doesn’t have to be a local company or one of the same size – you can get a good indication of what works and what doesn’t for your target audience by assessing their activity – even if it isn’t like-for-like. Platforms like Semrush offer tools to help identify competitors, but you can always start by searching for similar products and services in Google and see who is taking up space.

How to do competitor analysis

Once you have your competitors defined, you can begin looking at their websites and social media sites:

• What sort of language are they using in their copy?
• What imagery and posts get the most engagement?
• What topics do they cover?

You’ll need to scroll through their feeds a fair bit to get a good indication of what works for them, but it is worth it, as you’ll be left with a list of topics, language, imagery ideas, and more, that your audience has found engaging or not. You can then use this data to inform your organic activity.

Analysing Competitor Paid Ads

It doesn’t stop at organic activity, either. While it may be difficult to track a competitor’s out-of-home media activity and third-party display advertising, there are ways to see what paid advertising activity they’re running on other platforms.

5 Best Ad Transparency Tools For Competitor Analysis

Most Social media platforms have ad transparency tools to help you see what marketing other companies and accounts are doing, but they vary in usability and information. The Mozilla Foundation, home of Firefox, produced a report on ad platform ad repositories in April 2024 and summarised that none of the platforms assessed were fully functioning due to limited information sharing, user experience and many other factors.

However, many are still useful for competitor analysis of creative, copy and (in some cases) performance.

So, here’s a breakdown of a few common and handy tools you can use to check your competitor’s activity:

1. Meta

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library

Pros: Search by Location, Ad Category, Keyword and Specific Advertisers

Cons: Minimal information on ad performance. Cannot see inactive ads apart from certain topics, such as social issues, elections or politics.

2. TikTok

https://library.tiktok.com/ads

Pros:

Search by Location, Ad Type, Dates, Keywords, and Specific Advertisers.

Includes #Ad content produced by influencers.

Ads are available for one year past the last impression.

Includes some demographic and data insights.

Cons: Cannot Filter by topic/category – eg. Politics/social issues.

3. LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/ad-library

Pros:

Search by Location, Date, Keyword and Specific Advertisers.

Ads are available for one year past the last impression.

For ads targeted to the EU, the Ad Library includes additional information, including ad impressions, ad targeting and dates the ad ran.

Cons: Cannot Filter by topic/category – eg. Politics/social issues.

4. Google

https://adstransparency.google.com

Pros: Search by Location, Date, Website and Specific Advertisers, platforms and topics.

Ads are available for one year past the last impression (longer in some cases).

Includes some impressions data.

Cons: Impressions data delayed by 90 days.

5. Bing

https://adlibrary.ads.microsoft.com

Pros: Search by ad content or Specific Advertisers.

Ads are available for one year past the last impression.

Includes some impressions data.

Cons: You cannot filter by date or country until on the advertiser’s page. Impressions data only for EEA areas.

X (Formerly Twitter) also has an ad repository, but it’s only available for countries in the EU (thanks Brexit), so it’s pretty unhelpful for UK businesses. You can view political and US-based-issue ads via an exported CSV file, but it’s incredibly non-user-friendly and only contains ads from 5+ years ago.

These tools will help you identify what your competitors are doing via paid advertising. They may not always tell you how engaging things are or how they’re impacting ROI, but you can get a good idea of the gaps in the market, how you can stand out and what you can do better.

How Affinity Can Help You

We’ve years of experience across digital and offline advertising, from Paid Social Ads to PPC, Out-Of-Home Print work to SEO, and more. We can offer you guidance and advice on the best content angles, manage your campaigns, create your graphics and more to help you thrive in your niche.

Check out our Digital Marketing Case Studies and Multi-channel Case Studies to explore how we’ve helped our clients achieve their goals.

Get in touch today for more advice on competitor analysis or help coming up with your ideal advertising strategy.