28 Powerful PPC Spy Tools (To Beat Your Competitors’ Ads)

Anything that might make me feel like a secret agent also made me beg my mom to Don’t throw money at PPC campaigns and hope something sticks. 

Hope is expensive.

Your competitors are making strategic moves right now because they use PPC spy tools to build winning strategies.

They spy on you, too.

When you know what your PPC competitors are doing, it informs your pay per click strategy: you cherry-pick the best stuff and brand it. This saves time, money, and effort. 

It’s how you play the game efficiently, and it’s worth it for three reasons:

1. Paid advertising returns $2 for every $1 spent— a 200% ROI rate
2. Traffic from PPC ads yields 50% more conversions than organic content
3. It's fun

Squinch your eyes, sly spies.

It's spy time.

Google Search results show competitor info. But not every detail. And they don’t include competitors making a killing with Display or Facebook ads.

A basic strategy targets more keywords, spends more money, and gets more search volume.

But competitor spying finds brand new channels, offers, and other gold mines you haven’t considered. 

You also must know what to do with your competitive data. 

Changing your entire strategy because of a competitor doesn't make much sense—wear your own pants. Their website traffic and landing pages could look attractive, but their backend funnel and sales cycle may be as deep and intricate as the ocean.

Don't be the Titanic. Respect what's beneath the surface.

So, in addition to the Google Search Network, let's find other pockets of competitor gold to amplify your PPC strategy.

The biggest PPC management platform is Google Ads.

Let’s start with Search Network.

Inside your Google Ads account, there's a report called Auction Insights. Run that report.

On your account tab, click Auction Insights. This shows all your competitors from the account level.

You'll see a list of current domains that bid on your keywords.

It looks like this:

Google Ads Auction Insights: You're the row labelled You. All the other rows are bad guys.

To drill further down, select ad campaigns, ad groups, or keywords.

Remember, the report only shows competitors of your current targets. If you're not advertising nationally, there are more outside the Auction Insights report.

Find those sneaky PPC competitors too with a tool like iSpionage (more on this below).

You’ll find extensive lists of old, current, and new advertisers with keyword overlap in your domain. 

The example above shows more than 300 competitors. Focus on ones with additional keywords that don't overlap with yours.

Other well-known tools like SpyFu and SEMrush uncover competitor PPC keywords too.

SpyFu has a beautiful user interface (UI). A favorite feature is the competitor Kombat Venn diagram.

Click on any part of the Venn diagram to find keywords a competitor is bidding on that you're not.

SEMrush has built-in functionality for tracking competitor keywords. See which keywords your competitors bid on and find Product Listing Ads (PLAs) and YouTube intel.

Another helpful competitor analysis tool with paid and organic research is Serpstat. It provides PPC advertisers with keyword information and other competitive data.

With Serpstat, view the CPC of your target keywords. Then view any related keywords Google's top-ranked domains also bid on. It’s a great place to find winning keyword opportunities (even if they come with high competition).

There's more. 

Track your competitor’s domain performance and their progress over time. Serpstat creates keyword maps of competitor websites.

Marketing teams and PPC agencies use Ahrefs to track ranking positions and the number of backlinks pointing to their competitors.

Use Ahrefs to find 

• Which phrases get bids
• How competitors' ads look
• Their landing pages 
• Keyword rankings
• Search volume and more

In Ahrefs Organic Search Report, look at the keywords your competitors rank for in organic search and the traffic they bring. Ahrefs has data for 150 million keywords in the U.S. alone, so it’s comprehensive.

The Top Pages report shows which pages send the most traffic to competitor sites. Ahrefs also has a Content Gap feature to find keywords your competitors rank for, but you don't.

Use these tools for a ton of valuable insights and competitor info.

(More on what your competitors do on other PPC channels and using that intel later.)

6. SE Ranking

Use SE Ranking tools to track 

• Ranking
• Keywords
• Backlinks
• Site structure and more

It’s also great for competitor analysis. It provides info about competitors’ organic and paid search strategies. 

The Google Ads Display Network is one of the best places to pan for gold.

Unlike the Search Network, competitors on the Display Network get super creative with offers and funnels.

Visitors are spread out between stages of the conversion cycle, so advertisers must be smart to keep it flowing.

Here are some tools to spy on competitors’ Display ads. 

Marketers use AdBeat to analyze competitors across various Display networks. It shows 

• Competitor spending levels
• Ad copy
• Placements
• Landing pages
• And media buying trends

Use its reports to find winning competitor ad formats and track performance over time. Then compare it to your ads and refine your own campaigns to improve ROI.

Similarweb's display advertising research shows info on competitors’ ad placements, traffic sources, and audience demographics.

See what sites bring competitors the most traffic and their successful ad creative to spark ideas for your own display ad placements.

9. AdClarity 

AdClarity spies on competitors and your own campaigns.  

Reports include info about 

• Competitor ad creative
• Budgets
• Traffic sources
• Landing pages
• And media buying across display, social, video, and mobile ad networks 

You know PPC traffic doesn't only come from Google Ads.

Facebook ads, Twitter ads, YouTube ads, and LinkedIn ads are hefty PPC traffic drivers. Don't ignore any competitors using those channels to their advantage.

Sponsored content is on a huge PPC rise (promoting your blog posts, for example), and many companies wonder what new tactics their competitors use to drive traffic and conversions.

Sprout Social is an awesome social analytics tool that does more on the organic research side than SEM ads. But it does some pretty neat tricks on the social PPC side too.

Sprout Social can analyze paid traffic and organic reach for Facebook pages and break engagement down to regular ads, mobile-specific ads, and sponsored stories.

Through its Paid vs. Organic widget in the Custom Report Builder, users can see how their paid and organic engagement and impressions compare across social networks. 

Plus, Sprout's Paid Performance Reporting reviews social advertising across channels and audiences to identify top-performing campaigns and optimize future ad spend. 

Talk about a way to get a leg up on competition! 

What a clever way to turn the word spy into something more positive—a mention. Mention puts audience, brand, and competitor insights in one spot. 

Monitor the web, listen to your audience, and analyze unlimited profiles. Listen in on (spy on) important conversations, monitor over 1 billion sources across the web every day (press, reviews, forums, and blogs), and uncover trends. 

You gotta love the wordplay on this site. 

Fanpage Karma calls itself the No. 1 social media manager with 600,000 users in 180 countries and over 10 million profiles. 

Use it to analyze your social media interactions and your competitors' in real-time (every ten minutes) down to the smallest detail. Data includes

• Number of fans
• Weekly growth
• Posts per day
• Post interaction
• And reach per day

Emplifi is an all-in-one social solution. See your competitors’ social media activity and track content. 

Use continuous listening to see how their paid ads perform and see what your community thinks about your competitors with sentiment analysis.

Hootsuite has been around for years, and it's widely used to publish and schedule social media posts. But it's more than a scheduler.

It also has social media analytics that shows your best content, what's trending, and what your competitors are doing. 

Add a competitor as a social media stream to follow their activity from your dashboard, and do the same with specific keywords and hashtags.

For a free option, you won't find anything better than the Meta (Facebook) Ad Library. Use the page to browse active ads across different categories and countries.

For a specific competitor, go to their Facebook page, scroll to the Page Transparency section, and click see all to go to the Ad Library.

16. AdSpy

AdSpy is another tool with a large bank of paid social ads from Facebook and Instagram. 

Search by keyword, competitor, demographics, and engagement metrics to find top creatives. It’s great ad inspiration and helps you keep up with trends. 

It's time to talk about the importance of spying on your competitors' landing pages.

Landing page testing is one of the fastest ways to improve PPC performance. We won't go into the trillion things you can do to improve your conversion rates here, but you should care about it. Deeply.

If you improve your conversion rates by just 20% overnight, you effectively reduce your PPC ad spend and get the same results.

And even better, use that improved performance to be more aggressive with your paid traffic acquisition efforts.

Okay, let's look at two of my favorite PPC spy tools for landing pages.

iSpionage isn't only a search network competitor spy tool. It has a landing page spy feature tool you'll love.

Feed iSpionage the PPC keywords and competitor domains you want to track, and it’ll alert you when your competitor's landing page changes.

It beats checking your 29 competitors manually once a week.

iSpionage—it makes life easy. Sometimes changes are minor, but iSpionage will catch ‘em all. 

If you’re working on a tight budget and want to start small, check out Stillio's automatic screenshot tool.

This one's cool. Tracking specific competitor URLs. Follow a mix of homepages and landing pages, and decide when you want the screenshots taken.

Double down on click-to-close tracking.

If you're in the lead generation space, then a lot of your conversions will never turn into sales.

But, for example, if a specific keyword, ad, and landing page combo yields a 30% higher closing rate compared to all other leads you're getting, you’d want to know about that.

Append Google's GCLID parameters to your final URLs and other PPC channels. Always.

When you get data back, match the lead data with raw PPC data and learn what PPC ad campaigns bring the highest quality conversions.

Add more budget to those. 

And it's not just for lead generation. You can do the same for SaaS and eCommerce, and see which combos bring the higher average order values.

Now take things one step further with the PPC spy tool Woopra.

Woopra—this is where things get interesting. Run a cohort analysis or a sales funnel picture at the keyword level.

In your PPC account, many only track first-step conversions (like an opt-in).

But you need to know how far those keywords travel through your sales funnel before they turn into money.

When you have this data, pause keywords and channels that look good in your PPC account, but horrible in your bank account.

These back-end tracking tools make you extremely smart with your money while outperforming your competitors at their own game.

We’ve covered keywords, display placements, and landing pages. Now let’s look at the backend tracking and testing tools your competitors use to their advantage.

If you use Google Chrome, you're in luck.

My favorite Chrome extension shows the tech used on every site I visit. That tool is Wappalyzer.

Once you have Wappalyzer installed, go to any website or landing page. The tool automatically creates a list of JavaScript and other technologies it finds.

Here's a quick look at our website:

Conversion rate optimization apps like Picreel and Visual Website Optimizer aren't PPC spy tools, but they give your competitors more from PPC advertising.

Install Wappalyzer to Chrome and look at your competitors' sites and landing pages to find their secret tools. 

Now they're not so secret anymore. You're Sherlock effing Holmes.

MixRank gives intel on people, companies, and technologies and offers hourly updates.

It’s great for sales prospecting, competitive analysis, and market research. Tap into its directory to find leads and contact information on key decision-makers your competitors already target. Also, see what technology competitors' sites and apps use.  

BuiltWith shows what websites are built with. From your competitor's hosting provider to their CMS, shopping cards, and analytics. See if they use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, social media tracking, a CDN, an SSL certificate, chatbots…you name it.

BuiltWith analyzes every part of your competitors' websites and shows their technology usage and spending.  

Then look at your own usage and make changes to improve performance.  

BuiltWith isn't specifically a PPC spy tool. But if you can spy on your competitors' PPC tech stack, it’s too valuable to leave off this list.

The Search Monitor has been mining SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing, aka PPC ads) data since 2007. 

They monitor online ads for competitive performance, crawling 1.7 million ads every hour. Get automatic updates about your competitors' market share, ad rank, and ad copy. See their clicks and spending. And spy on their display ads and placement.  

Enter your competitor's URL and some of your top keywords. Pro Rank Tracker then provides a list or a graph (your pick) of your competitors and how they rank. 

BuzzSumo monitors content and shows you what’s working. Use this data to get ahead of your competitors and improve what’s already successful. 

BuzzSumo finds trending topics, SEO insights, and distribution data across the Internet. 

It also identifies your industry's influencers. Enter a competitor's domain and get major social media metrics.   

Anstrex gets its name from three words — analyze, strategize, and execute. 

Anstrex’s claim to fame is unmatched data—more ad networks than any other PPC spy tool in more countries with millions of ads from thousands of advertisers in an easy-to-understand format.

Get more for your advertising spending, save on research time, and build awesome landing pages. 

You've done some serious competitor research and have a ton of data.

Now’s the fun part. Use that data to improve your PPC performance.

Like this:

• Use a PPC keyword spying tool and put those keywords in a spreadsheet (like Excel)
• Use a Display spying tool and list placements in a spreadsheet

Now, go into your PPC accounts and export your keywords and placements (if you have any) to Excel.

You should have two sets of files, one with keywords and/or placements from your competitors and one with your own data. Now combine them into one Excel sheet.

Next, use the Remove Duplicates feature inside Excel (this varies depending on what type of Excel software you have).

This leaves you with a list of new keywords and placements to test. 

Joe Putnam wrote an awesome post on Kissmetrics that many people overlook.

You spend time spying on competitors, so it shouldn't be a surprise if they're spying on you.

So limit their ability with two settings in Google Ads.

Do this with cautious fingertips.

If you know your competitors' location and that they’re spying on your ads, you could exclude your ads from that area. 

But, be careful. If you get legitimate business from those locations, you don’t want to exclude customers. You’ll win in other ways. 

If you decide to exclude your competitors’ locations, then add that to your ad campaigns, so your competitors won't be able to see your ads while in that city.

But how do you know if competitors are clicking your ads?

There are tons of IP logging tools on the market. They show you which IP addresses are visiting your site and/or landing pages.

This is how to tell if competitors spy on you. And excluding by IP address would be more accurate. 

Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn't provide this insight. 

If you're serious about knowing how often people visit you and the exact company name behind the visit, try Snitcher. 

Snitcher shows you 

• What companies visited your site, 
• How many times they visited
• How long they visited
• Which pages they were on

See what competitors come back again and again. It also shows leads deciding if they want to work with you.

So, it doubles as a lead-generation tool.

Many people will tell you not to copy your competitors’ marketing strategies. This advice comes from fear that it won’t work for you. While that may be true, here's what I do:

• Emulate first
• Figure things out after

Try the same offers, designs, and ads your competitors use. Steal their ideas and make them better.

One thing to avoid—being stagnant.

It's fun to track things and feel on top of the world. But, it's even better to be actionable with that data.

PPC spy tools give insight into 

• Competitor ad creative 
• Bidding strategies
• Ad positions
• And keyword rankings. 

Use this intel to shape your own PPC strategy. Don’t do everything your competitor does. Look for new opportunities, explore trends, and see where to invest ad dollars for higher ROI. 

Essential features for monitoring competitor Google Ads campaigns

Your stack of PPC spy tools should track competitors' Google Ads performance in search and display. You'll want info for organic and paid traffic results, including 

• Keywords
• Ranking
• Ad placement
• Copy and creative
• And budget

Real-time monitoring and historical info are also important.  

Maximize value from PPC competitive intelligence

Maintain a competitive edge and put your findings into action. Expand your keyword research, test new ad copy and creative, adjust budgets, try new paid network placements, and regularly fine-tune your PPC strategy.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Learn with caution—what works for your competitors may not work for you 
• But don't be afraid to look at everything your competitors are doing and understand why they might be onto something you aren't
• Use this data to expand into new and profitable traffic sources or improve your conversion and sales rates

Keep that in mind as you pursue your growth.

Have fun spying, Sherlocks 😉