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?

ProviderPricingOrganic SEOPaid SEMCompetitor TrafficReviewFree Trial

SEMrush
$99
Month
Yes, full suite of organic SEO research toolsYes, the best selection of toolsYes, estimates on competitor on-site metricsReviewFree Trial

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.