How to track a competitor's Google Ads every week (without clicking through the Transparency Center)

Description and use

An Apify Actor automates weekly diffs of competitor Google Ads from the Transparency Center, highlighting new, stopped, and continuing ads for actionable insights.

Problem

Competitors’ Google Ads are visible only for the current week in the Ads Transparency Center, lacking historical data and alerts, making it hard to track changes over time.

Outcome

Automating the weekly diff reduces manual effort, reliably captures ad changes, and provides actionable insights such as new offers, stopped tests, and long-running ads.

Workflow

• 1. Specify competitor by domain, brand name, or Transparency Center URL and optional country.
• 2. Run the Apify Actor once to create a baseline snapshot of all ads.
• 3. Schedule the Actor to run weekly; subsequent runs label each ad as new, stopped, or continuing relative to the previous snapshot.
• 4. Review the changelog or export results to CSV/Excel, Google Sheets, or Slack for further analysis.

Evidence

Google publishes every ad a company runs in the Ads Transparency Center. It's a great resource with one big gap: it has no history and no alerts.

Source

I built an Apify Actor that does the weekly diff for you: Google Ads Transparency Scraper & Competitor Ad Monitor

Source

From the second run on, every ad is labelled new, stopped or continuing compared to last time.

Source