Google Ads Transparency Scraper - New Ads Monitor

Watch your competitors in the Google Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com) and get only the ads that are new since your last run. Give it a website domain (nike.com) or an advertiser ID (AR18378488041124659201); schedule it daily or hourly; each run returns the ads Google started showing after your watch began and that you have not received yet.

Every ad row has the advertiser name and ID, creative ID, format (text, image, video), first and last shown time, days shown, a direct image URL, Google's preview URL and a link to the ad in the Ads Transparency Center. With ad details on (the default) it also adds every country the ad was shown in with first and last shown dates, who paid for the ad, its topic and the image of every variation.

Unofficial. It reads only what the public Ads Transparency Center shows, without logging in.

What it is for

• New competitor ads, every morning: schedule it once a day for a list of competitor domains; each run returns only the ads that appeared since the last run.
• Ad library export: the first run for a target returns its newest ads (20 by default, up to 1,000) and remembers the rest.
• One country or one format: region and format are filters that Google applies itself. Measured on 2026-09-24: Nike Retail BV has about 80,000–90,000 ads anywhere and 19 in Japan — the region filter returns those 19.

How the "new ads" watch works

1. First run for a target: reads Google's list (up to maxAdsScanned, 40 per request), returns the maxAdsFirstRun ads with the most recent first-shown time, and remembers every ad it read.
2. Every later run: reads only ads Google lists as shown since shortly before the previous check, and returns ads that are not remembered and whose first shown time is after the watch started. When the first run read the whole list for the target, ads first shown up to 2 days before the watch started also count, because Google can list an ad a little after it first runs.
3. An ad that was already running when the watch started but was not read in the first run (Google does not list ads newest first, and the order changes between requests) is remembered, not reported as new. Measured on 2026-09-24: a second run 20 seconds after the first found 57 such ads for nike.com and returned 0 of them as new.
4. When Google has more ads than maxAdsScanned for a target, a free row says so, with Google's own estimate of the total. For very large advertisers, narrow the watch with region or format.

Watches are kept per target, region, format and watchName. Use a different watchName for two schedules that watch the same target. Do not let two runs of the same watch overlap in time: both would read the same new ads before either remembers them, and both would return (and charge) them; a free row says when a run could not save what it read.

When one run has a domain and that domain's advertiser ID as two targets, an ad found for both is returned once, for the first target.

Input

Field	What it does
targets	Domains, advertiser IDs or Ads Transparency Center links, one per line (up to 50). Empty = nike.com.
region	Two-letter country code (US, GB, DE, JP …) or anywhere. Empty = anywhere.
format	all, text, image or video. Empty = all.
maxAdsFirstRun	Ads to return the first time a target is checked (0–1,000). Empty = 20.
maxAdsScanned	Ads of Google's list to read per target per run (40–1,000). Empty = 400.
includeAdDetails	Countries with dates, who paid, topic and variation images for each returned ad. Empty = on.
watchName	Separate watches for the same target. Optional.
resetMonitoringState	Forget what the watch remembered and start again with a first check.

Output

One row per ad (status: "ok", changeType: "new"):

Column	Meaning
advertiserName, advertiserId	The advertiser as named in the Ads Transparency Center
creativeId, adUrl	The ad's ID and its page in the Ads Transparency Center
format	TEXT, IMAGE or VIDEO
firstShownAt, lastShownAt	First and last time Google shows for the ad (ISO time, UTC)
daysShown	Number of days shown, as Google reports it
daysSinceFirstShown	Added: whole days from first shown to the check
imageUrl, imageWidth, imageHeight	Direct image of the ad when Google archives one. Many text ads are archived by Google as an image of the ad (headline, text and URL as it appeared).
previewUrl	Google's own preview script for ads that are rendered, not archived as an image (many video and responsive ads). It is not an MP4 file.
domain	The domain Google shows for the ad (domain searches)
isFirstCheck	true on the first run for this watch
sponsorName	Who paid for the ad, as the ad's page in the Ads Transparency Center names it (with ad details on)
adTopic	Google's topic for the ad when it gives one
regionsShown	Every country the ad was shown in: countryCode, firstShownDate, lastShownDate, and impression bounds when Google gives them (mainly EU countries)
variationsCount, variationImageUrls	Number of variations and the image of each archived variation
euImpressionsLowerBound, euImpressionsUpperBound	Google's EU impression range when it gives one
detailsRead	false when the ad's detail page could not be read (its detail columns are empty)

Rows that are not ads are free and say why: no-new-ads, watch-started, no-ads (Google lists nothing for this target — it gives the same answer for a domain it does not know), partial-scan, blocked, unreadable, bad-input, budget-reached.

Pricing

• Run start: charged once per run in which Google's ad list was read for at least one target. Not charged when Google refused every request.
• Ad returned: charged per ad row. Free rows are never charged.
• A run whose maximum total charge has no room for the start fee plus one ad requests nothing and is charged nothing.
• Ad details are included in the ad price (one extra request per returned ad).

Measured on 2026-09-24 (build 0.1.3)

• nike.com, first run: 400 ads read on 10 pages, 20 returned with details, in 22 to 65 seconds.
• Same watch 20 seconds later: 0 new ads, 57 older unseen ads remembered and not reported.
• AR18378488041124659201 with region JP: 19 ads on 1 page, all 19 returned.
• Requests from Apify's servers: 34 of 34 answered through datacenter IPs and 33 of 34 through residential IPs (one connection failure); no check page in 102 requests.

Limits

• Google does not list ads newest first. A watch sees every new ad only when the whole list for the target fits in maxAdsScanned; otherwise a free partial-scan row says so.
• maxAdsScanned is capped at 1,000 per target per run (25 requests).
• A domain Google does not know and a domain with no ads get the same empty answer from Google, so both come back as no-ads.
• If Google answers with its "unusual traffic" check page, this Actor does not solve it or keep asking from other IPs: the target comes back as a free blocked row and nothing is remembered, so the next run checks it again.
• Ad text is not transcribed: an ad comes as Google's archived image of it (imageUrl) or as Google's preview script (previewUrl).
• Political ads are a separate Google library and are not covered.

Support

Something missing or wrong? Open an issue on the Issues tab with the run ID and the target.