Tracking which display ads your competitors are running and where they are running them is complicated. For the most part, savvy advertisers today don’t often just run display ads is the way they used to. Advertisers are less likely to run ads on a specific website than they are to run ads to a specific person no matter what website they are one. This super short example is just intended to show that tracking your competitors display ads is hard because scraping that data just isn’t possible because display, retargeting, etc. is more user specific than it is location specific. To add to this, the ad messages are often dynamic based on the user’s behavior (website actions).
On this page, we’ll look at just a few companies trying to provide this data, although we think is less reliable than people thing.
Which Software Provides Competitor Display Ad Insights?
| Provider | Pricing | Organic SEO | Paid SEM | Competitor Traffic | Review | Free Trial | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 SEMrush | $99 Month | Yes, full suite of organic SEO research tools | Yes, the best selection of tools | Yes, estimates on competitor on-site metrics | Review | Free Trial | @semrush | Technical SEO Analysis, Backlink Research, Backlink Management, Keyword Rank Tracking, Ranking History, Organic Traffic Estimates, Local Rankings, Local SEO Listing Research, Keyword Competitors, PPC Keyword Research, PLA Research, Display Ad Research, PPC Ad Research, Paid Search Research, Competitor Traffic Analysis, |
 Spy Fu | $40 Month | Yes, limited to backlinks and keywords | Yes, limited to search PPC only | No | Review | Free Trial | @spyfu | Backlink Research, Ranking History, Backlink Management, Keyword Rank Tracking, Organic Traffic Estimates, Keyword Competitors, Paid Search Research, PPC Keyword Research, PPC Ad Research, |
 Mangools | $50 Month | Yes, limited only backlinks and keywords | Yes | Yes | Review | Free Trial | @mangools | Backlink Research, Keyword Rank Tracking, Organic Traffic Estimates, Local Rankings, Keyword Competitors, |
 SEO Power Suite | $299 License | Yes, robust and full featured | No | Yes, traffic estimates and other metrics | Review | Free Trial | @seopowersuite | Technical SEO Analysis, Backlink Research, Backlink Management, Keyword Rank Tracking, Ranking History, Organic Traffic Estimates, Local Rankings, Keyword Competitors, Competitor Traffic Analysis, |
 Raven Tools | $110 Month | Yes, well-featured only missing competitor keyword analysis | No | No | Review | Free Trial | @raventools | Technical SEO Analysis, Backlink Research, Keyword Rank Tracking, Organic Traffic Estimates, Local Rankings, |
Choosing the Best Display Ad Spying Software
We’re honestly not convinced that any display ad tracking approaches are accurate because we understand how display advertising is bought. SEMrush is the only vendor we researched who claims to have this data. We were able to run a high-volume display ad client through this tool and it did find just one of our ads to our pleasant surprise. However, smaller clients came up with not data.
While we wouldn’t recommend using software for this purpose only, using SEMrush has tons of other features worth considering.
Related Resources
- SEMrush: Provides some data on competitor display ads.