Running an ad campaign is intimidating! But what if we say, you could see every single ad your competitors are running, down to the last detail. Won’t it be a brilliant way to gain insights into making a successful ad? Who knows, you might even be able to nail the perfect ad on your first try itself! Sounds too good to be true? It can become true, with Google Ads Transparency Centre!
So let us dive down and find out how you can use Google Ads Transparency Centre to your benefit!
Exploring Google Ads Transparency Centre:
Google Ads Transparency centre is a treasure trove of information for people who want to take a sneak peek at their competitors’ strategy. But first, you need to know how to use it, which is what we will go into detail in this blog:
1. Researching Political ads
Google Ad transparency centre primarily segregates the ads into two categories – Political ads and every other ad.
You can see Political ads that have aired in the last 7 years, filtered down to the country and platform of your choice.
2. Search functionality
This platform comes equipped with a search option that lets you see the ads in your domain.
You can search the platform with either one of the following:
- Your competitor’s website name
- The advertiser name (Note: Some advertisers will be registered, and some will not be. You can only search registered advertisers)
3. Filters
After searching for a website’s name, you will get search results of all the ads they have run in the past 30 days.
You can further slim down the results with these in-built filters:
- Date – You can choose the ads that were run within a specific period. You can select the last 7 days option or the 30 days option. You can also go a step further and set a custom date from start date to end date.
- Location: Choose any country of your preference to see the ads that ran in that particular region by your competitors.
- Platform: You can choose the platform of your choice from YouTube to Google Maps.
4. Details of an ad
You can select any ad of your choice and view more details like the ad format, view the whole ad in case of video ads, caption and the last shown date.
Additional ways to analyze your Competitor ads
There are some things that Google Transparency Centre does not provide. Some of these are:
- Ads of advertisers who are not registered
- You cannot see the ad on the page where it is being displayed
- The audience targeting options provided by your competitors
Although there are no straightforward ways to find these details, there is a sneaky way you can find them. Let’s see how:
Suppose you see an ad when scrolling through, click on the three dots button under it. A pop-up will arise, where you can see the advertiser’s name and the location the advertiser chose to display it.
Below that, you have an option to see more from the advertiser, if you are interested.
You can also select another option below that says “Why you’re seeing this ad?”. If you click the drop-down button, you can get a rough idea of the audience preference selected by that particular advertiser.
Why is my competitor not showing up on search?
Sometimes, you can type your competitor’s website name in the search bar, and Google Transparency centre will not return any results. Why is this happening?
This is because your competitor has not undergone the Advertiser verification process by Google. In such cases, you will not be able to see their ads on the platform.
But don’t worry, Google is consistently pushing verification for their users, so you will not have this issue for long.
What is the Advertiser Verification Process?
To get verified by Google as an advertiser, you need to provide the following information:
- Personal information
- Business information like location, contact details and nature of business
- The content in your ad will be under review to see if they are in alignment with Google’s ad policies
- Payment information
6 ways how Google Ads Transparency centre can help you
Google Ads Transparency centre provides ample information about your competitors’ ad strategy.
- You can figure out the format of ads they are running frequently
- Based on the messaging in the ad, you can deduce the stage of the funnel they are focusing on.
- Which platform is your competitors primarily focusing on? Is it YouTube or Google?
- The ad style they are working with. Are they rolling out vintage video ads or UGC type videos?
- See how many variations of an ad they are running
- Find the best performing ads based on the duration it has been running. (Pro tip: The longest running ads are the most successful ones, because the ads that lose money would be pulled back quickly.)
Conclusion
Running smarter ads does not have to feel like a hassle, thanks to the Google Transparency centre. You can gain insights into your competitor’s ad strategy, see what is working and what is not.
Then there is nothing left to do other than tweaking it based on your business and adopting it in your ad strategy.
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