Best Ad Spy Tools for 2022
No matter how creative, experienced and resourceful you are. You can’t call yourself a pro marketer if you’re not constantly keeping tabs on what your competition is doing and what’s trending in the industry.
Don’t let doubt crawl into your mind. Gathering intelligence on opponents is key to gaining an edge over them. As long as you’re not copying exactly what they do, you can gain invaluable insights and inspirations from their work and learn from their mistakes. There’s no better thing than an ad spy tool to help you with that.
These tools provide you with enormous, ever-expanding databases of ads and the means to search through them to find the ones that best fit your standards. Powerful ad spy tools don’t just sweep every ad they encounter. Aside from having various options for you to tailor your search, they provide extensive analyses on ad performance. This is key to understanding what makes a winning ad.
There are many ad spy tools out there with different sets of features and capabilities. Some are only focused on specific platforms or ad types which could be a little confusing. But don’t worry. We’ve gathered a list of the most competent ones to help you find your ultimate weapon in battle. Here it goes:
Adplexity has well established itself as one of the market leaders in the last few years. This powerful tool is perfect for serious marketers who want to expand their research beyond social platforms.
It can identify and track competitor campaigns across all major sources, including mobile, desktop, eCommerce, native, push, carrier, and enterprise ads.
This plethora of features makes Adplexity an all-round tool to cover almost all platforms and ad types. You can download banners and landing pages and see campaigns running in over 75 countries. There are multiple filters to help you adjust your search parameters. Adplexity also provides extensive campaign analyses down to the network and tracking.
All these capabilities don’t come cheap. Adplexity has a separate subscription service for each ad type it covers, all available for hefty prices. Oddly, the Facebook ad spy tool is limited to eCommerce, so there’s no way to track other types of ads on the platform. Another downside is that there’s no free version or trial, so if you’re low on budget, you may want to look elsewhere.
Intelligence tool for mobile, desktop, eCommerce, native, push, carrier, and enterprise ads
Ability to download landing pages
Huge ad database with multiple filters to fine-tune your search
Extensive campaign performance analysis
PowerAdSpy is one of the most capable ad spy tools out there, specialized in collecting ads from social platforms. It covers Facebook, Instagram, GDN, YouTube, native, Reddit, and Quora.
What makes PowerAdSpy great is that it lets you access a massive database of over 100 million ads across the most popular social networks. You’ll be able to optimize your search by numerous filters and find well-performing ads based on your niche, keywords, domain, etc.
Similar to Adplexity, this tool provides users with statistical analyses of ad performance. There’s also the super handy option to download landing pages. There really aren’t many downsides to PowerAdSpy, except that the paid plans are not flexible. For example, if you’re only looking for native ads, you have the pay the full price for the “Titanium” plan which is an eye-watering $300 per month. Luckily, there’s a full-functioning free version that lets you search a hundred times for ten days.
Ad Spy tool for 7 social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, GDN, YouTube, native, Reddit, and Quora
Massive database consisting of 100+ million ads
Statistical analysis of ad performance
Ability to download landing pages
Free subscription plans (100 searches for 10 days)
If you’re looking for an alternative to PowerAdSpy for spying on Facebook and Instagram ads, AdSpy is a terrific option. It currently holds one of the largest ad databases on the market with almost 150 million ads across 26 countries.
This software is exceptionally good at locating cloaked ads and lets you search based on ad copy, URL, comments, etc. The filters AdSpy provides are also extensive. You can fine-tune your search by numerous elements like age, gender, region, and user feedback. It’s fast, user-friendly, and relatively affordable with a free trial option.
One of the largest ad databases on the market with more than 150 million ads from 26 countries
Ability to locate cloaked Facebook and Instagram ads
Visto is another great social media ad intelligence tool. With access to a large ad database from over 50 countries, it’s a great way to get ideas from winning ads in your niche.
Visto provides a lot of industry-specific filters to help you find the most relevant ads. Hunting down ads with this tool is pretty straightforward thanks to the simple and neat UI. It even has an insights feature with useful information about ad performance.
Thankfully, visto offers a free plan for users, although it’s limited to 200 daily searches. The full-feature subscription currently costs $330 per month, which is a bit expensive.
Easy-to-use and straightforward
Access to millions of ads from 50 countries
Free subscription plan (200 daily searches)
BigSpy is a great ad spy tool for newcomers that provides ad intelligence for 7 social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and AdMob.
Though not the most polished and feature-rich spy tool out there, it still could be quite helpful in finding out what your competition is doing and what’s trending in your niche. You can filter the results based on multiple factors like ad type, region, and CTA.
Unfortunately, BigSpy no longer offers a free plan and you should pay at least $6 per month to gain access to its features.
Ad intelligence tool for seven social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, AdMob, and more
Multiple search filters like demographic, region and CTA
SpyFu is the go-to option for marketers looking for a powerful tool to gather intelligence on paid and organic search ads. It has plenty of features to help you figure out what PPC and SEO strategies are working for your competitors.
You can download all of your rival’s most efficient keywords and perform a thorough domain comparison based on ad variation and keywords.
While SpyFu is superbly helpful in tracking competition performance on search engines, it lacks any kind of ad spy tool for social platforms. Though not much of a weakness, it compels you to find another third-party tool for that matter, which could be a burden on your budget. SpyFu itself is moderately priced and offers regular discounts for customers.
Powerful spy tool for sponsored and organic search ads
Domain comparison based on ad variation and keywords
Ability to download all of the competition’s keywords
When it comes to spying on native adverts, Anstrex is second to none. This powerful tool grants access to an enormous database of over 10 million ads across 27 networks. It’s extremely user-friendly and straightforward, with great options to spy on several websites and platforms for native ads.
A unique advantage of Anstrex is its landing page ripping tool. This tool is a clever solution to streamline the landing page design process. It can capture any landing pages and allows you to customize and optimize them using the in-app editor. Then you can directly deploy them on your server via the in-built FTP connectivity.
Anstrex also provides intelligence services for push and dropship ads, though they’re not as good as its native ad spy tool yet. The good news is you don’t have to pay for every subscription to gain access to Anstrex’s awesome native ad spy tool. Dropship intelligence is free for now and the native ad plan is $70 per month.
Professional intelligence tool for native advertising
Enormous database with over 10 million ads from 27 networks
Superb landing page ripping tool
There’s always something wrong with spy tools that keeps them from becoming the perfect solution for your ad intelligence needs. Either there’s an outrageous price tag, a weird subscription method, or a technical flaw.
AdFlex was designed specifically to overcome all these hurdles and provide a competent, fast, and free tool to get accurate results and help you overpower the competition.
Using AdFlex’s powerful search tool, you have access to an enormous database of ads across 7 different social platforms. There are more than 20 variables to refine your search parameters and find ads based on location, language, age, gender, etc. Once you hit the search button, AdFlex displays accurate results in mere seconds.
AdFlex’s ace card is the way it collects ads from Facebook. Unlike other social ad spy tools out there that rely on the inaccurate Facebook Ad Library, AdFlex organically picks ads directly from Facebook itself. This means you’ll get precise, hand-tailored ads from every possible placement!
AdFlex simply puts every amazing feature found in other ad spy tools in a package and gives it its own nice touch. Comprehensive analysis, landing page download, multi-user plan, and powerful search filters are all present for FREE!
Completely Free without requiring any credit card info
Collecting ads directly from Facebook without relying on Ad Library
Capable of finding ads in every possible placement
More than 20 powerful search filters
Comprehensive statistical analysis
Ability to download landing pages