Google Ads Scraper

Spy on every ad your competitors are running on Google. Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, Play: text, image, and video, with run dates, click-through URLs, preview thumbnails, and full spend and impression disclosure for political ads. Pay only for what you get.

🎯 What you get

Type a brand name, a website, or an advertiser ID. Press Start. You get back every ad that company is running right now, with:

• The ad itself: headline, description, image or video, and a preview you can view in your browser
• When it ran: the first day it appeared, the last day it was seen, and roughly how long it has been live
• Where it ran: every country the ad showed in, with the last date it was seen there
• Where it points: the click-through link and the display URL shown under the ad
• Every variation: if the advertiser ran ten tweaks of the same creative, you get all ten
• Full political disclosure: spend ranges, impression ranges, targeting locations, and FEC committee codes for US political advertisers

Works for Shopify stores, your local plumber, and everyone in between.

📋 How to use it

Step 1. Tell it who to scrape

You have four ways to point the tool at an advertiser. Use any of them, or mix them in the same run:

• Type a website: enter shopify.com and the tool finds the advertiser automatically
• Type a brand name: enter Shopify and the tool returns a list of matching advertisers
• Paste an advertiser ID: something like AR01625195283841286145. Open any advertiser page on adstransparency.google.com and look at the URL in your browser. The ID is the AR... code at the end. For example, in https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR01625195283841286145, the ID is AR01625195283841286145.
• Paste a Transparency Center link: copy any URL from adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/... and paste it in

Step 2. Narrow it down (optional)

• Country: restrict to one country (US, GB, DE, FR, JP, etc.) or leave it global
• Platform: choose between Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, Play, or any
• Date range: only ads that were active between two dates
• Political only: return only regulated political ads (requires a specific country)
• Format: keep text ads, image ads, video ads, or any combination
• Already seen: paste the ad IDs you have from previous runs and the tool skips them. You pay nothing for duplicates. See the next section.

🔁 Pay only for new ads

Running a weekly or monthly tracking scrape on the same advertiser? Paste the ad IDs you already have into the Already seen input and the tool skips them completely.

How to get the IDs from a previous run: open your previous run's Output tab on Apify, export the dataset as CSV, and paste the creativeId column straight into this field.

Step 3. Pick your fields and add-ons

Every core field is on by default. Turn off the ones you do not need to keep your rows lean.

Below the field toggles, five optional add-ons let you pull in data that nobody else gives you:

• Read the text inside the image. Most text ads on Google come back as flat images with no structured headline or description. Turn this on and the tool extracts the full ad copy from the picture itself. Works in 30+ languages automatically, no setup. Essential if you're studying competitor messaging or want a searchable database of ad copy.
• Download the actual ad image. Save every ad creative as a PNG in your Apify storage. Perfect for building a swipe file, running visual diffs against past runs, or feeding a design team fresh reference material.
• Save the landing page. Download the full HTML of the page each ad links to and stash it in your Apify storage. You only pay once per unique page. You get a permanent, searchable archive of every landing page your competitors are driving traffic to, perfect for auditing their funnel, spotting A/B tests, or comparing offers side by side.
• Per-country breakdown. Know exactly which countries an ad ran in and when it was last seen in each one. For political ads, also get the impression band per country. Critical for international research, regulatory work, and global campaign audits.
• Decode political targeting. Google publishes targeting location codes in a cryptic format. Turn this on and they come back as readable ZIP codes, states, and cities. Journalism gold for anyone covering political advertising.

All add-ons are priced per ad, charged only when they actually produce a result. Leave them off for cheap basic scraping, turn them on when you need the depth.

Step 4. Run it and export

Click Start. Results fill the Output tab as each page is processed, so you can start downloading before the run even finishes. Every row has a status field. Success means the ad came through cleanly. Anything else is a plain English message telling you what happened and what to do next.

💰 Pricing

You only pay for what you actually get. No subscriptions, no minimums.

Always charged

Event	Price	When it fires
Ad found	$0.0015	For each ad you receive
Website or brand lookup	$0.001	One-time fee per website or brand name you enter. Fires when we match it to the right advertiser in Google's database. Skip this fee entirely by pasting the advertiser ID directly.

Optional add-ons

Turn these on one by one in the input form. You only pay when they actually produce data.

Add-on	Price	What it gives you
Region enrichment	$0.001 per ad	A breakdown of every country the ad ran in, with dates and (for political ads) impression bands
Download the image	$0.002 per ad	Saves the ad image as a file in your Apify storage
Read the text inside the image	$0.003 per ad	Works in English, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Italian, Korean, and 15+ more. The tool detects the language of each image on its own, no setup
Save the landing page	$0.02 per unique page	Downloads the full HTML of the page each ad links to and saves it to your Apify storage. One download per unique URL: if 50 ads point to the same page, you pay once.
Decode targeting locations	$0.002 per ad	For political ads, turns Google's location codes into readable ZIP codes, states, and countries

Real example: 500 ads from one advertiser with default settings costs around $0.75. Add OCR to all 500 and landing page saves (typically 20-50 unique pages per advertiser) and you add roughly $2.00-$2.50, charged only on successful downloads.

🏛️ Political ads

Scrape any political advertiser and every row automatically includes:

• Whether the ad was classified as political
• The countries where it ran
• The number of impressions it received, as a range
• How much was spent, as a range, with the currency
• The advertiser's legal name (as disclosed to regulators)
• The advertiser's FEC committee code (for US political ads, cross-reference with FEC.gov)

The spend and impression numbers only show up when you turn on the "political only" filter and pick a specific country. Want to see which ZIP codes a campaign targeted? Turn on the Targeting locations add-on. Great for journalism, compliance, and opposition research, without writing a line of code.

🔒 Ads for age-restricted categories (alcohol, gambling, pharma)

Google hides certain categories of ads unless you are signed into a Google account. If you want these included, paste an authenticated cookie into the userCookies input.

How to export your cookies

1. Install the Cookie-Editor browser extension. It is free, has over a million users, and is safe: Chrome or Firefox
2. In the same browser, sign in at https://adstransparency.google.com using a disposable Google account (see warning below)
3. Browse around the site for a minute so Google sets its session cookies
4. Click the Cookie-Editor icon while you are still on the Transparency Center
5. Click Export, then Export as JSON, and copy what it gives you
6. Paste that JSON into the userCookies field on this actor

That is it. Every request now goes through as that logged-in account.

Safety notes

• Never use cookies from your real Google account. The cookies give the scraper the same access a signed-in user has. Always create a throwaway Gmail, use it once, export, and forget about it.
• Cookies expire. Google refreshes them every few days or weeks. If results drop off, re-export and paste fresh cookies.
• Expect tighter rate limits. Signed-in requests have stricter limits. Keep runs small, and switch to Residential proxies if you start seeing blocks.
• Your input is encrypted. Apify masks the cookie field in the UI and in logs. Still, treat it like a password.

🌐 Proxy settings

By default the tool uses Apify's built-in proxies and rotates automatically. No setup needed.

• Automatic (default): Apify picks. Works for most runs.
• Datacenter: Fastest and cheapest.
• Residential: Use this if you start seeing "blocked" errors. Google treats residential IPs as real users.
• Your own proxies: Paste your URLs.

💡 Good to know

• You can mix websites, brand names, advertiser IDs, and links in the same run.
• If a website matches more than one advertiser (like a big retailer with subsidiaries), the tool picks the one with the most ads. For small or niche brands, a brand name search works better.
• Video ads come back with the real YouTube watch URL, plus the video ID and duration. To download the actual MP4, pass the URL into our YouTube Video Downloader.
• Text ads on Google can come in two flavors. About 10 to 15 percent of the text ads from big advertisers give us a clean headline and description. For the rest, Google only shows a static image of the ad. Turn on OCR to read the text out of those images. The destination URL is never shown for text ads, only for image and video ads.
• Landing page files are stored in your Apify key-value store as HTML, one per unique URL. You can preview each page directly from the dataset by clicking the landingPageUrl column. When opened in a browser, images and styles load from the original live site.
• Files are stored in your Apify account. How long they stay there depends on your Apify plan.

❓ FAQ

My website returned no ads. Why? Google matches ads to the company name, not the website. Try the brand name on its own (Shopify rather than shopify.com), or paste the advertiser ID directly.

Runs fail with "blocked after 5 proxy rotations". What do I do? Google temporarily flagged the IPs the tool was using. Switch to Residential proxies in the Proxy Configuration input, or wait a few minutes and try again.

How long are downloaded images kept? They live in your Apify storage. The retention period depends on your Apify plan.

Can I avoid paying for ads I already scraped? Yes. Use the Already seen input (in the Narrow it down section). Paste the IDs of ads you have from previous runs in any format, commas or new lines or spaces, and the tool skips them. No row, no charge. Perfect for weekly or monthly tracking where you only want to pay for genuinely new ads.

Why is destinationUrl empty for most of my ads? Google only exposes the destination URL for video ads. Text and image ads served as static snapshots in the Transparency Center do not include it. This applies to every tool that scrapes the Transparency Center. Google withholds the data at the source.

Do I pay for the same landing page twice? No. The tool only downloads each unique URL once per run. If 50 of an advertiser's ads point to the same page, you pay $0.02 once and every row links to the same saved file.

Does this really work for political ads? Yes. Flip on "Political only" and pick a country (this one filter will not work globally). You get spend, impressions, and the countries the ad ran in. Turn on Targeting locations to also get the ZIP codes and states the campaign targeted.

Can I download the actual video of a video ad? Not directly here. Video ads go through YouTube, so this tool gives you the YouTube link. Pass that link into our YouTube Video Downloader to grab the MP4.

Which platforms can I filter by? Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, Play, or any of them. The platform is listed on every row.

Does OCR work in languages other than English? Yes. The tool detects the language of each image on its own. No language setting needed, no configuration. It covers all major scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Greek, and more).

How do I get only political ads? Turn on "Political only" and set a specific country. The tool uses Google's political disclosure endpoint and returns only regulated political ads, with spend and impression data included.

🔗 Other tools you might like

• YouTube Video Downloader: feed in the YouTube URL from any video ad and download the raw MP4.
• YouTube Transcript Download: pull the full spoken transcript of any video ad for deeper analysis.
• YouTube Channel Videos & Stats Scraper: compare an advertiser's organic YouTube channel against their paid ads in one go.

⚖️ Disclaimer

This tool is intended for personal, research, educational, journalistic, and compliance use. You are responsible for complying with Google's Terms of Service and the laws in your jurisdiction. The developer is not liable for misuse. Data availability depends on what Google's Ads Transparency Center shows at the time of your run.

Keywords: google ads, ads transparency center, political ads, FEC, competitor ads, ad library, advertiser lookup, scrape google ads