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Competitor ad research

See which ads a competitor runs, since when and in which countries.

Steps

Name the advertisers.
Run the ad library actors and compare by format and date.

Actors for this job

Google Ads Transparency Scraper

Give it a brand name, a landing domain or a Google advertiser id and it returns the ads Google publishes in its Ads Transparency Center as JSON: one row per ad with the advertiser's verified name and country, format (text, image, video), first and last day shown, days shown, regions and the archived ad image. From $1.80 per 1,000 ads; you pay only for rows you get.

$1.80 per 1,000 ads on the Free plan, down to $1.35 on higher plans

Competitor ad intelligence: every ad a competitor ran this quarter, by country, format and surface, with the copy of its text and Shopping ads.
New-ad alerts: schedule monitor mode daily and get only the ads that started or stopped.
Brand protection: find advertisers that bid on your brand name or point ads at look-alike domains.

Apify Store · Guide

Quick start

Run the first actor from Python (set APIFY_TOKEN):

# pip install apify-client
import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
run = client.actor("arcadium/google-ads-transparency").call(run_input={
    "searchTerms": ["nike.com"],
    "mode": "ads",
    "maxAdsPerAdvertiser": 20,
})
items = client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).list_items().items  # apify-client 3.x returns a Run object
print(items)

Or give an AI assistant the actor as tools:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=arcadium/google-ads-transparency",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>"
      }
    }
  }
}