Advertising is a key factor for every small business in this modern age. It helps them to achieve their goal by targeting their customers through various mediums. Let’s look at 10 tools we can use to spy on competitors’ ads so we can gain insight into what works and what doesn’t.
So what are effective tactics to outperform competitors and make your worthy place in this competitive world? A great product & good service is vital 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.
Spying on your competitor’s ads can be 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.
In this article, you will get to know about these tools, their working procedure, and their cost.
Why Spy on Your Competitor’s Ads
There is nothing wrong with spying on competitors’ ads. It is the most simple way to get knowledge about ongoing digital marketing strategies, their keywords, content, and much more.
By doing this you will get to know why they are ahead of you in some areas and gaining that insight, you’ll also find out what you are doing better than your competitors.
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 the way to set it in this list, with this tool, you’ll have in-depth insights into your competitors’ display ad strategies and top organic keywords & many more statistics.
Including all of this, Semrush also reveals your competitors’ 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 ranging from $119 per month to $449 per month.
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, with a price tag of $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 ranging from Free to $78/month.
#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, reach, 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.
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 starting at $99/month and going up to $999 per month.
#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 competitors 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.
#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 ranging from $59/month to $299/month.
#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 ranging from $99/month to $499 per month.
#10. Moat
Last but not the least, Moat is a free tool for the digital advertising industry and 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
Moat does not have a free version but it provides you a free trial. They do not list the price of the tool on their website but instead encourage those interested in signing up for a demo of the tool.
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. All of the above tools can easily help you spy on their strategy.
About the Author: Shiv Gupta started his journey in the digital marketing world at the age of 17. He grabbed deep knowledge of the industry and earned multiple awards. Incrementors was founded by him to provide the best marketing solution to struggling businesses with a goal to help them achieve higher sales and conversions. Incrementors don’t give fluff or “high-level” advice. They just give an insanely actionable plan that works.
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