Google Ads Transparency Scraper — Competitor Ad Spy at $0.64/1,000 ads

See every Google ad any advertiser is running — search, YouTube, display — straight from the Google Ads Transparency Center. Search by brand keyword, domain or advertiser ID, filter by country and format, and get clean JSON with dates, days-active and an isNew flag.

The cheapest ad-spy on Apify: $0.64 per 1,000 ads + $0.001 per start. No login, no API key, no browser, no proxy add-ons. Filtered and duplicate rows are never charged.

Who uses this

• Media buyers & dropshippers — see which creatives competitors keep running (long daysActive = winning ad), and which they just launched (isNew).
• Affiliate & offer researchers — track advertisers in a niche daily; monitor mode only outputs (and only charges) ads you haven't seen before.
• Agencies — automated competitor ad reports per client, per country.
• AI agents — structured, predictable ad intelligence for autonomous marketing research (see below).

What you get per ad

Field	Example	Notes
advertiserId	AR0781…	stable Transparency Center ID
advertiserName	Temu
advertiserVerified	true
creativeId	CR0946…	stable — safe dedupe key
format	text / image / video
firstShown / lastShown	ISO dates	campaign lifetime
daysActive	211	long-running = proven ad
isNew	true	first shown within newWithinDays (default 7)
imageUrl / videoUrl / previewUrl		creative media
adUrl		destination URL, best effort (mostly text ads)
transparencyUrl		one-click open in Transparency Center
sourceQuery	temu.com	which of your inputs found it

Input modes (combine freely)

{
  "keywords": ["hello fresh"],
  "domains": ["temu.com"],
  "advertiserIds": ["AR07816964328396947457"],
  "region": "US",
  "maxAdsPerQuery": 200,
  "onlyNew": false
}

• keywords — resolved via Transparency Center suggestions; top 3 advertisers with active ads are scraped per keyword.
• domains — all ads whose verified advertiser matches the domain.
• advertiserIds — most precise; grab IDs from any previous run.
• region — ISO alpha-2 (US, GB, DE, ID, …) or anywhere.

Monitor mode — pay only for new ads

Set "onlyNew": true. The Actor remembers every creativeId it has already output (key-value store) and skips them next run — skipped rows are never charged. Combined with a daily schedule this gives you a live feed of every new ad your competitors launch.

How to schedule this Actor (recommended)

1. Open the Actor → Schedules tab (or Console → Schedules → Create new).
2. Cron 0 6 * * * (daily, 6 AM).
3. Input: your advertisers/domains + "onlyNew": true.
4. Add an integration (Slack/email/webhook) on new dataset items — you'll only be notified when competitors launch something new.

Daily monitoring of 10 advertisers typically costs a few cents per month because monitor mode only charges new creatives.

For AI agents & MCP

This Actor is built to be called by AI agents via the Apify MCP server or API:

• Minimal input that just works: {"keywords": ["<brand>"]} — everything else has sane defaults.
• Predictable cost: exactly $0.00064 × ads + $0.001 per run; maxAdsPerQuery is a hard cost cap.
• Stable schema: every field above is always present (nullable, never missing); creativeId is a stable dedupe key across runs.
• Recommended agent loop: resolve brand → advertiserIds from first run → schedule with onlyNew: true → read only fresh competitor ads each day.

curl -s "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/tactful_anvil~google-ads-transparency-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"domains":["temu.com"],"region":"US","maxAdsPerQuery":50}'

Related Actors

• Brand Ads Spy — Google + LinkedIn Ads in One Feed — this actor's big brother: the same Google feed plus LinkedIn Ad Library in one normalized dataset, with cross-network monitor mode.
• Google Play Reviews Scraper & App Store Reviews Scraper — mine competitor app reviews for the pain points their ads target.
• Contact Details Scraper → Bulk Email Verifier — turn advertiser domains into verified outreach lists.

Fair use & data source

Only public data from the Google Ads Transparency Center (published by Google for transparency purposes). Reasonable rate limits. No login, no personal data.

Example output (one real row, 6 Sep 2026)

{
  "advertiserId": "AR06241571277706887169",
  "advertiserName": "Taha Temur",
  "advertiserVerified": false,
  "creativeId": "CR12697029994019291137",
  "format": "text",
  "firstShown": "2026-01-20T13:18:09.434Z",
  "lastShown": "2026-01-28T08:50:44.204Z",
  "daysActive": 8,
  "isNew": false,
  "adUrl": null,
  "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/1119550157563880731",
  "previewUrl": null,
  "videoUrl": null,
  "adText": null,
  "transparencyUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR06241571277706887169/creative/CR12697029994019291137",
  "sourceQuery": "temu→Taha Temur"
}

Changelog

• 0.1.2 (19 Sep 2026) — Fix onlyNew memory across runs. The seen/previous-run memory was stored in the run's default key-value store, which is per-run on the Apify platform, so onlyNew silently returned the full result on every run. It now lives in a named store in your account, so scheduled runs return only what changed. No field, default or price changed.
• 0.1.1 (16 Sep 2026) — A run with no input no longer fails: the example input is the default, so "Run" with an empty form (or {} via API) returns the demo dataset. Output unchanged.
• 0.0.10 (10 Sep 2026) — Billing helper fixed (per-ad charges had silently stopped for runs using dynamic imports); test suite wiring.
• 0.0.1 (27 Aug 2026) — Launch.

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Related Actors from the same account

• Brand Ads Spy Scraper
• Ad Budget Signals Checker
• Company Hiring Signals Scraper