Most media buyers still spy on competitor ads by hand. Tab after tab. Screenshot after screenshot. It eats hours, and the data goes stale fast.
There is a quicker way. With Apify, you can automate media buying research across Google, Meta, and TikTok, then pull every competitor ad into one clean dataset.
We at AFFNinja use this exact setup to feed our competitor ad intelligence and creative swipe files.
This guide shows which Apify Actors pull winning ad creatives, ad copy, keywords, and landing pages from each platform. Plus how to schedule it all on autopilot. No fluff, just the workflow our media-buying team uses.
How Apify Actors Replace Hours of Manual Ad Spying
Apify is a cloud scraping platform. You rent small programs called Actors that grab public data and hand it back as a clean table.
The Apify Store holds 25,000+ ready-made Actors. Many do one job only, like pull ads from a single platform. You paste a competitor name or URL, hit start, and download results as JSON, CSV, or Excel.
Three things make this gold for media buyers.
You can also wire the output straight into Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, Make, or n8n. So new creatives ping your team the moment a rival launches them.
We rate Apify as the cheapest way to build competitor ad intelligence at scale, sitting right next to paid spy tools like the ones in our ad spy tools roundup. Those tools give you a polished dashboard. Apify gives you raw, exportable data you own outright.
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Media Buyer Shortcut
Instead of manual ad spying, rent a single-purpose Actor, pull the ads, and ship the output straight to Sheets, Airtable, Slack, Make, or n8n.
Good fit for daily competitor sweeps, creative monitoring, and export-first research workflows.
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How AffNinja Powers Ad Research With Apify Actors
We test paid offers daily across SaaS, finance, dating, and AI tools. Speed matters. Spying by hand does not scale past a few advertisers.
What changed our workflow was simple. Each Apify actor talks to a public ad library and returns structured ad data as JSON, CSV, or Excel. You get clean rows, not screenshots.
Three traits make this stick for affiliates.
You also avoid every official ad API. No app review, no developer token, no rate limit headaches. That alone saves days.
Our rule at AffNinja: if you screenshot the same ad library twice in a week, automate it.
Pull Competitor Google Ads From the Transparency Centre
Google has a public Ads Transparency Center. Every advertiser verified by Google gets a profile there. It lists the ads they have live across Search, Display, YouTube, Shopping, and Maps.
Apify has several Google Ads Transparency Center scraper Actors that read this data for you. Most need no login, since the source is public.
Here is what they pull per ad.
You search three ways. By advertiser name, by website domain, or by a direct advertiser ID. Region filters let you pull only ads shown in your target GEO, say GB or US. Some Actors add OCR, so text inside image ads becomes searchable too.
| Search input | What you get back | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Advertiser name | All public ads tied to a brand | Quick competitor sweep |
| Website domain | Every ad linked to that domain | DTC and offer research |
| Advertiser ID | Fastest, skips the search step | Daily scheduled monitoring |
Why media buyers care.
Here is a speed trick our team uses. Run the Actor once with a competitor name, grab the advertiser ID it returns, then feed that ID into every future run.
ID searches skip the lookup step, so daily monitoring stays fast and cheap. Save the IDs of your whole competitor set once, and your pipeline barely costs anything to keep current.
One honest limit. Google does not publish spend for normal commercial ads. Spend ranges only show for political and election ads in the EU, US, India, and a handful of regions.
No scraper can invent numbers Google hides. We flag this because plenty of generic guides pretend otherwise. If paid search is your lane, our PPC advertising guide pairs well with this data.
Mining Keywords And SERP Gaps With The Google Search Scraper
Creatives are half the job. The other half is keyword research.
The Apify Google Search Results scraper pulls a full search engine results page in clean JSON. You feed it keywords or a Google URL.
It returns more than blue links.
For affiliate buyers, this is gold. You learn which advertisers bid on a keyword, what hooks they use in ad copy, and which questions buyers ask before they convert.
🥷 Ninja tip: Run a keyword in two countries. Compare the paid ads. Geo gaps show you cheap markets before rivals notice.
Scrape the Meta Ad Library for Facebook and Instagram Creatives
Meta keeps a public Ad Library with every active ad across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. It is the richest free creative source in paid social.
The Meta Ad Library scraper Actors on Apify turn that library into structured rows. The better ones return 50 or more fields per ad.
What you get.
You search by keyword, by a Facebook Page URL, or by pasting any Ad Library URL with your filters already set. Then filter by country, language, media type, and active or inactive status.
Here is the metric that matters most: days a creative has stayed live. In paid social, longevity is the cleanest free signal of a winner. If a DTC brand keeps one video live for 90 days, that video is paying for itself.
Smart automated jobs to set up.
Pricing sits around $1 to $5 per 1,000 ads, depending on the Actor. Some use Meta's official Graph API at about $0.005 per ad. Meta is strict on automated traffic, so residential proxy rotation keeps your runs clean.
Same spend caveat as Google. Spend and impressions only show for social, political, and election ads. For normal commercial ads, treat days-live and creative volume as your signal.
Mine TikTok Creative Center for Winning Video Hooks
TikTok is creative-led. You are not buying keywords, you are buying attention. So the research that matters is simple. Which video hooks are pulling right now.
TikTok gives you two public sources, and Apify reads both.
| Source | Coverage | What it returns |
|---|---|---|
| TikTok Ads Library | EU, EEA, and UK only (DSA) | Targeting, reach estimates, creatives |
| TikTok Creative Center | Global, 80+ countries | CTR rankings, engagement, video URLs, industry data |
The TikTok Creative Center top ads Actors let you filter by country, industry, objective, ad format, and even Spark Ads. So you can pull only proven, high-CTR videos in your niche and download the creatives for your brief.
TikTok recently folded Creative Center into its TikTok One hub, so a few older Actors had to be rebuilt around the new pages.
What you pull.
For media buyers, this is your creative brief on autopilot.
Two honest limits. TikTok exposes no ad spend at all, not even ranges. And the Ads Library caps at 3,600 results per search, so split big jobs into narrow queries by date or keyword.
Once your research points to the hooks and offers worth testing, you need a budget to test them. That is where our partner deal earns its place. We teamed up with TikTok For Business to hand AFFNinja readers up to $6,000 in free TikTok ad credits. So your Apify research feeds the creatives, and the credit funds the test.
Set Up Your First Automated Ad Research Run in 9 Steps
Here is the exact path from zero to a scheduled pipeline. Each step is quick.
- Create a free Apify account: You get $5 in monthly credits, no card needed.
- Open the Store and pick an Actor: Search “Google Ads Transparency”, “Meta Ad Library”, or “TikTok Creative Center”, then open one with strong reviews and clear docs.
- Run a tiny test first: Paste one competitor and cap results at 10 to 20. Check the cost and the fields before you scale up.
- Add your competitor list: Drop in names, domains, Page URLs, or Ad Library URLs in bulk.
- Set your filters: Pick GEO, language, media type, and date range, so you only pull what matters.
- Turn on residential proxies for Meta and TikTok: Datacentre IPs get flagged fast on those two.
- Export the dataset: Download as CSV, or push it straight to Google Sheets or Airtable.
- Schedule a daily or weekly run: Add a webhook so new creatives drop into Slack on their own.
- Build your swipe file: Sort by days-live or CTR, save the winners, and brief your creatives off the patterns.
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Research Stack
Use Apify to turn manual ad spying into a scheduled research pipeline.
Start small, filter hard, export winners, then schedule daily or weekly runs so fresh creatives land in Sheets, Airtable, or Slack without extra manual work.
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Open Apify → |
Stitch Google, Meta, and TikTok Into One Swipe File
The real edge is not one platform. It is all three in one table.
Run three Actors against the same competitor list, then join the datasets by advertiser, date, and destination URL. Now you see a brand's full paid footprint in a single view.
| Platform | Free source | Strongest signal | What to automate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ads Transparency Center | Long-lived headlines | Daily competitor sweep | |
| Meta | Meta Ad Library | Days a creative stays live | Weekly creative diff |
| TikTok | Creative Center top ads | CTR and engagement rank | Trend and hook tracking |
What this unlocks.
Pair the data with a tracker like the ones in our RedTrack and Binom breakdown, and you close the loop. From competitor research, straight to your own tested campaign.
Quick example. Say you run a nutra offer. You pull a rival's Google ads and see one headline live for four months. You pull their Meta ads and find the same promise on a video that has stayed live 80 days.
Then TikTok Creative Center shows a near-identical hook topping its category by CTR. Three data points, one clear winner to model. That is a brief you can hand a creator the same afternoon.
The Ninja Verdict
Manual ad spying is dead weight. Your rivals pull the same libraries you do, just faster.
Apify hands you the whole research layer for the price of a coffee. Google, Meta, and TikTok creatives, keywords, and trends, all in one scheduled pipeline you own.
Set up three Actors, point them at your competitor list, and let the data build your swipe file while you focus on creatives and testing. Then put your TikTok For Business ad credits to work on the hooks the data already proved.
Most buyers will keep screenshotting by hand. The ones who automate will brief sharper creatives, faster, and own a swipe file nobody else has.
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Affiliate Disclosure: This post may contain some affiliate links, which means we may receive a commission if you purchase something that we recommend at no additional cost for you (none whatsoever!)
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