Advertising is the key factor for every business in this modern age, it helps them to achieve their goal by targeting their customers through various mediums. Earlier it was done by traditional mediums such as newspapers, posters, radio, etc. This post will tell you about top 10 tools to spy on your competitor’s Ads
But now due to the emergence of the internet, the whole structure of advertising and targeting to the customer has changed, and we can expect that the upcoming technologies like A.I, augmented are going to revolutionize the industry completely.
Worldwide digital ad spending is predicted to reach over $375 billion in 2021. (eMarketer)
The world is moving towards the digital era, now starting a business digitally is much easier than ever, that is great news for upcoming entrepreneurs throughout the world, but at the same time, the competition is also bigger than ever.
So what will be the effective tactics to outperform competitors and make your worthy place in this competitive world?
Great service & having a website with proper off-page & on-page SEO is the major plus point to increase your business, but you also need a real audience to find your product/service. And for that, you have to learn the strategy of your already existing competitors by spying on them.
We all know that spying on your competitor’s ads is a very difficult task. But in this technology-based generation, there are some top-quality tools available to spy on competitors’ ads without being tracked.
These tools will help you in spying on major ads like:
- Native ads
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- LinkedIn ads
In this article, you will get to know about these tools, their working procedure & whether they are free to use or not.
Why Spy on Your Competitor’s Ads
No, there is nothing wrong with it, spying on our competitor’s ads is not evil as it sounds at first.
Even though it is the most simple way to acquire knowledge about ongoing strategies like their keywords, content, link building ideas, and much more.
By doing this you will get to know about why they are ahead of you in some areas & gaining that insight by spying on them you’ll also find out what you are doing better than your competitors.
This strategy helps you to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of yours as well as your competitors, that’s the part of an effective marketing campaign.
The bitter truth is that it might be possible that your competitors are also doing the same thing.
For example, if you rank higher in search engines or get more audience engagement on social media platforms. They will start spying on your strategies to know where they are lacking so that they can also get the same results.
In the same way by spying on your competitor’s ads you will get to know what your competition does to attract your target audience, and you will get to know about the product launches & discounts that you have missed.
By spying on your competitor’s ads you will get to know more about the strength your competitor is showing through their ads.
Nobody will blame you for having a peek at what other companies consider thoughtful and effective.
Here Are the Top 10 Tools to Spy on Your Competition’s Ads:
1. SEMrush
If you want to Conquer SEO competitor research then SEMrush is the tool that will help you do that.
Its competitor analysis features make it in this list, with this tool, you’ll have in-depth insights into your competitor’s display ad strategies and top organic keywords & many more statistics.
Including all of this, Semrush also reveals your competitor’s advertising strategies in Google Ads and allows you to monitor their social media efforts.
If your competitor is running ads on Google, then by using Semrush “Advertising Research” feature you’ll be able to view their paid keywords, URLs ranking in paid search results, and ad copies.
Semrush is also one of the best social media competitor analysis tools. With the help of Semrush’s Social Media Tracker, you can monitor your competitors’ social media presence and gain knowledge on what content is trending in your industry.
Semrush: Pricing Plans
SEMrush provides 3 paid plans.
- Pro – $119.95/mo
- Guru – $229.95/mo
- Business – $449.95/mo
If you’ve never tried the tool Semrush before and want to explore the features discussed above, I’d encourage you to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Semrush Pro.
2. Anstrex
Anstrex is an Ad intelligence tool mainly used for analyzing and finding native ad campaigns with the help of Anstrex you can get a thorough analysis of any native ads that have been served by your competitors on the web.
By Anstrex you can easily access the competitor’s native ad data in any language. You can use the filter feature given in this tool to search native ads based on languages, terms containing, ad network, the text contained in landing page URLs.
When you discover what companies use keywords exactly similar to yours, you can dig deeper into campaigns of specific advertisers.
At the top of the window, some tabs will provide us with gathered information about all native ad campaigns run by your competitors.
By switching between tabs, you will find all ads launched by your competitors, their native ad networks they use, their traffic share by country, and more.
This tool makes competitive analysis very easy for native advertising experts.
Anstrex Pricing
Mainly Anstrex is available at a lower price than other spy tools that often have limited functionality and features.
It costs $69.99 per month. There are no pricing tiers in this tool, at this price you get full access to all features.
3. Spyfu
Spyfu is one of the best competitive analysis tools in the market.
In the beginning, you just need to enter your competitor’s domain in SpyFu to get a quick summary of their top organic keywords, estimated SEO and PPC clicks, top pages, backlinks, and other useful data.
Also, by Visiting the “AdWords History” section you can easily browse your competitor’s complete Google Ads campaign history, including their most trusted keywords, estimated clicks/month for those keywords, and their cost/click.
This will be Super helpful data if you’re planning on recreating your competitor’s ad strategies.
So, overall it is a great tool to get information secretly about your competitors.
Spyfu pricing
SpyFu offers 3 pricing plans:
- Free for Life plan – $0/mo (unlimited searches,10 search results)
- Basic plan – $39/mo (unlimited search results, 5k weekly tracked keyword rankings)
- Professional plan – $78/mo (15k weekly tracked keyword rankings, custom branded reports).
4. PowerAdSpy
This tool is mostly used by professionals for spying on competitor’s Facebook ads, it provides deeper information about other company’s ads, target audience, reaches, and more.
The tool also allows you to spy on ads run on youtube, Google, Instagram, Quora, and other major platforms.
You can also use the filter feature to search ads by keywords, domains, brand name, and many other parameters. But we all know nothing is free in this world so here is the price list of this quality tool.
PowerAdspy Pricing
PowerAdSpy costs start at $49/month, but you can also enjoy its free plan if you don’t do more than 100 searches and 1000 ads in 10 days.
If you are not doing more than 100 searches & 1000 ads in 10 days then you can use this free of cost, but if you want to explore more with more searches then you have to pay $49/month.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the important and leading tools in the SEO market to acquire competitor’s in-depth data analysis.
When it was launched its main purpose was to do backlink analysis. But now in so many years, the tool has evolved into a fully prepared SEO software that helps to track competitor’s ad data.
This tool allows you to check any URL’s top organic keywords & also gives you a rough estimate of how much traffic a competitor receives on those keywords.
Besides giving info about your competitors’ most linked-to pages,
Ahrefs also helps in determining your competitors’ most-shared content in the Top Content report in a very easy method.
Ahrefs Pricing
- Ahrefs offers 4 monthly pricing plans:
- Lite – $99/mo (5 projects, 500 tracked keywords)
- Standard – $179/mo (10 projects, 1500 tracked keywords)
- Advanced – $399/mo (25 projects, 5000 tracked keywords)
- Agency – $999/mo (100 projects, 10000 tracked keywords)
6. SimilarWeb
Similarweb is one of the most widely used tools in the market to acquire the competitor’s data analysis.
It provides all information like competitor’s traffic, traffic sources, top organic keywords, top paid keywords, and other important data points with great accuracy.
The amazing thing about this tool is that you can access all this data for free and can also export it to a PDF file for later purposes.
Once you will get the detailed information in the form of a report, then you can easily navigate yourself to the “Competitors and Similar Sites” feature. SimilarWeb will display Top 10 competitors based on similarity and rank.
Through this, you can click on any of your competitor websites to generate a detailed analytics report.
SimilarWeb Pricing
SimilarWeb has only two plans — Free and Enterprise.
So, In short, this tool is kind of FREEMIUM means you can use many free features but when you want to use them on a large scale you have to spend some money to buy premium features or you can say Enterprise Plan.
7. Facebook Ad Library
Facebook Ad library tool is a free-to-use tool. To find active ads run across the Facebook network the easiest way is to check Facebook’s ad collection.
But, here is a NOTE to keep in mind that you have to disable your ad blocker before you start your research about your competitors. but in any case, you forget to disable your ad blocker, you will not get any result.
Facebook Ad Library Pricing
As stated earlier that this tool is free of cost you don’t have to spend a single penny from your pocket, but you have to keep in mind that you have always disabled your ad blocker while researching competitor’s data.
8. iSpionage
iSpionage is a keyword monitoring tool. If you are interested in monitoring your competitor’s paid ads then this tool is definitely for you.
There’s nothing more competitive than paid ads & paid campaigns. So this tool provides the information of your competitor’s best keyword, ad budget & also provides info about the money your competitors are spending on their PPC campaigns.
For brands considering PPC(Pay Per Click), such a tool is essential for keeping realistic expectations for ad spend.
This tool also allows you to see your competitors’ data in the form of graphs for comparison purposes.
iSpionage Pricing
There are 3 paid plans for using this tool:
- Starter – $59/mo (for small business owners & digital marketers)
- Professional- $99/mo (for small agencies, consultants & in-house ppc managers)
- Advanced -$299/mo (for growing agencies & digital marketing team)
9. Buzzsumo
As we all know that there are so many tools that have been made to spy on your competition & gather data from them. But if you are too willing to lead in this competition then you just don’t have to spy on their ads strategy you also have to be well aware of their content.
And for that Buzzsumo is the best tool in the market. This tool also allows you to look at top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand & specific competitors.
Other than all of this Buzzsumo provides you a new idea for a blog post & potentially hot topics to explore yourself.
Buzzsumo Pricing
There are 4 paid plans of this tool:
- Pro – $99/mo (For individuals and small teams.)
- Plus- $179/mo (More Alerts, more users, more everything! Great for growing teams or intermediate users.)
- Large -$299/mo(For Agencies and big in-house teams, you’ll get access to even more data)
- Enterprise -$499+/mo(Custom plans tailored to you. Include up to 5 years of data, 50+ alerts, and more. If you’re a global organization or a big agency, this is the best plan for you)
10. Moat
Last but not the least, Moat is a free tool for the digital advertising industry & it is also known as the digital ad search engine. It is a great tool to find out what type of creative ads your competitors are running & it also displays what type of ads your competitors are running on different brands and websites.
This tool also helps you in spying on your competitor’s paid marketing activities and accordingly, you can decide where to place your next display ad.
And the best part of this tool is that it makes your work easy by following your competitors and creating alerts every time they create a new ad.
Moat Pricing
Now let’s talk about the money we have to spend on this tool. Moat does not have a free version but it provides you a free trial and for the exact price of this tool you have to check it on oracle or just by going on their website.
Conclusion
So here are some final words from my side, all the tools discussed above are top-class tools to spy on the information of your competitor’s ads.
If you want to achieve effective results by spying on your competitors, then you must pick the tools which are perfect and suitable for your needs, and from all the above tools you can easily spy on their strategy.
Spying on your competitors makes you improve your plans and strategy by grabbing hidden opportunities.
