Black Friday 2026: Build a Competitor Ad Watchlist Before November

Description and use

Build a competitor ad watchlist before November using Meta Ad Library and Apify scraper to capture offers, formats, and hypotheses for early holiday strategy insights.

Problem

Need to track competitor ad offers early to identify patterns before peak holiday sales.

Outcome

A repeatable process to capture competitor ad offers, formats, destinations, and hypotheses, enabling early detection of pre‑holiday promotion strategies.

Workflow

• List 5–10 competitor advertisers
• Open Meta Ad Library manually for a few to understand columns
• Configure Apify Meta Ad Library actor with advertisers/searchTerms, country=US, activeStatus=active, maxAdsPerSearch=20
• Run actor and export CSV
• Map CSV to worksheet: offer text, format, libraryUrl
• Fill destination and hypothesis manually
• If useful, save task and schedule with onlyNewSinceLastRun=true

Evidence

Adobe's September 28 forecast puts US online holiday sales for November and December at $275.1 billion and discusses a preseason spike in October.

Source

The actor's input schema accepts advertisers or search terms, a country, an active status filter and a cap per search. Its documented output includes available copy, creative, libraryUrl and daysRunning.

Source

I have not rechecked this actor's live prices for this draft. Review the current Store pricing and set a spending limit before running a larger watchlist.