Google Ads Transparency Scraper & Monitor

Know when a competitor starts, stops or brings back a Google ad. Give it the websites of the companies you watch, pick the countries, and schedule it. Each run tells you what changed since the last one, plus a one-line summary per competitor.

The data comes from Google's public Ads Transparency Center, which lists the ads that verified advertisers run on Google Search, YouTube, Display, Shopping, Maps and Play. This is an independent tool. It is not made, endorsed or sponsored by Google.

Who it's for

• In-house marketers at e-commerce and D2C brands: get a morning digest of your competitors' new and stopped ads in Slack or a spreadsheet, so you notice a sale or a new campaign the day it starts.
• Agencies and freelance ad managers: run one watch per client and drop the weekly summary into your report: how many ads each competitor runs, what is new, what has been running the longest.
• Sales teams: check whether a company advertises on Google before you reach out, and since when.
• Developers: pull the full ad list into your own database through the API.

How to use it

1. Enter your competitors, one per line. A domain (acme.com) works best. You can also use an advertiser ID from the Transparency Center (AR…) or a company name. A name covers every advertiser registered under exactly that name (for example a brand's US and German companies), and the run log lists which ones were used. If no advertiser has that exact name, the log shows the closest ones with their IDs, and that line is skipped.
2. Pick one or more countries.
3. Leave What to return on Changes since the last run.
4. Save it as a task and add a daily or weekly schedule in Apify.
5. Optional: connect the task to Slack, Google Sheets, a webhook or Zapier/Make with Apify's integrations.

The first run records the ads the competitor has shown recently as baseline. From the second run on, you only get the ads that changed.

Use a different Watch name for each separate list (for example one per client). Runs with the same watch name share their memory of what was seen before.

What you get

One row per ad change

Field	Meaning
change	new, stopped, resumed, newRegion, newVariation, or baseline on the first run. In All ads mode it is listed
target, region	The competitor you entered and the country
advertiserName, advertiserId	The verified advertiser behind the ad. One website can have several advertisers (for example a brand's US and Japanese companies)
format	text, image or video
firstShown, lastShown, daysShown	When the ad was first and last shown, and on how many days
isActive	Whether it was shown within the last N days (7 by default)
imageUrl	A picture of the ad. For text ads this is Google's rendering of the ad
adUrl	The ad's page in the Transparency Center
regionsShown, variations	With Add ad details: the countries where it ran, with impression ranges where Google publishes them (mainly in the EU), and the number of variations

One summary row per competitor and country

Running ads, how many are new or stopped since the last run, how many of the running ads started in the last 7 and 28 days, a split by format, the five longest-running ads (often the ones that work) and the five newest ads. complete is false when the ad count stopped at your maximum; the counts then cover only the ads that were read.

Pricing

You pay per event, so a day with no changes costs only the run and the summary rows.

Event	Price
Run start	$0.005 per run (with the default memory)
Ad change: new, stopped, resumed, newRegion, newVariation	$3.00 per 1,000
Ad listed: baseline on the first run, All ads mode, or unchanged ads when you ask for them	$0.75 per 1,000
Summary row, one per competitor and country	$0.005 each
Ad details, only with Add ad details	$1.00 per 1,000 ads

For example, watching 10 competitors in one country every day, with about 150 ads each and 3% of them changing a day, costs about $1 for the first run and about $6 a month after that. Set a maximum cost per run in Apify if you want a hard limit; the run stops cleanly when it is reached, and the changes it could not report come out on the next run.

Good to know

• One run per watch at a time. If a run starts while another run is still using the same watch name, it stops with an error instead of reporting the same changes twice. Give overlapping schedules different watch names.
• "Advertising" can be unknown. When the ad cap stops a search before any running ad is found, isAdvertising is null, not false.
• Ad rows and summary rows share one dataset. Each row has type (ad or summary). Filter on it when you export or connect the results to a spreadsheet.
• Names can be ambiguous. Different companies sometimes share a name (for example "Nike" also matches unrelated companies called Nike in other countries). Use the website domain when you can.
• Changing "Count an ad as stopped after" is safe. The previous run's ads are re-checked with the new number of days, so it doesn't create false stopped or resumed ads.
• "Stopped" means an ad has not been shown for the number of days you set (7 by default), or it no longer appears in the Transparency Center.
• Large advertisers can have thousands of ads. Google lists ads by the date they were last shown, so in Changes mode each run reads only the ads shown since shortly before the previous run and stops there. That covers every ad that can have changed, even for an advertiser with thousands of old ads. The Maximum ads per competitor and country setting matters only when a competitor shows more ads than that at the same time (Nike runs well over 1,000 a day in the US). Then the run log warns you: new ads beyond the cap can be missed, and ads beyond it are never reported as stopped. Raise the cap for that competitor.
• "New" means first shown recently. An ad counts as new when Google first showed it after the previous run, or up to 3 days before it, because some ads reach the Transparency Center late. Google sometimes adds an ad that has run for years to its list; such an ad is recorded quietly instead of being reported as new.
• Changing the format filter starts a fresh watch for that competitor and country, so you don't get a flood of false "stopped" ads.
• The Transparency Center shows ads from verified advertisers only. Ad text inside text ads is shown as an image, not as text.