Most competitor analysis starts with a feeling: "they seem to be everywhere this quarter." Public data turns that feeling into something you can check. What a rival advertises, where, for how long, what they post and how people respond are all visible to anyone. The work is collecting it in one place, in the same shape, so the comparison is fair.
This page covers the two halves of that job, ads and organic content, and the tools that collect each. It ends with a simple competitor analysis template you can fill from the exports.
Half one: what they pay to show
Ads are the clearest signal of what a company wants to sell right now. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that does not work, so long-running ads tell you a lot.
- Facebook and Instagram ads. Facebook Ads Scraper searches the public ad library by keyword and country, or lists every ad of one advertiser. Each ad comes with its text, call to action, start and end dates and an active flag. Its Ad transcript mode turns video ads into text, so you can compare scripts side by side.
- Google ads. finds advertisers in the Ads Transparency Center by keyword and collects their public ads, or returns the details of a single ad: text, format, regions and landing page.
- TikTok ads. includes an ad library search and an ad lookup by id, next to its other TikTok modes.
- YouTube sponsors. YouTube Ads Scraper takes video links and names the likely sponsor of each video, from its description and paid-promotion disclosure. It helps when you want to know which brands sponsor the channels your customers watch.
Half two: what they publish for free
Organic posts show how a brand talks when it is not paying: the tone, the topics, how often it shows up and which formats it bets on.
- collects the latest posts of public Facebook pages, with likes, comments and shares.
- collects the latest posts or reels of public Instagram profiles, with captions, hashtags and view counts.
- collects the public videos of TikTok profiles.
Pull the same number of recent posts for every competitor, from the same date range, so that a busy brand does not look better just because it posted more.
A worked example
Say you sell a meal kit and three rivals compete for the same customers. A first pass looks like this:
- Run an ad search for each rival's brand name in your country. Export the results and count live ads per brand. Sort by start date to see which ads have run for months.
- Read the call-to-action column. If two rivals push "Get offer" and one pushes "Learn more", they are chasing different stages of the purchase.
- Run the transcript mode on their five longest-running video ads. Read the first sentence of each: that is the hook they found worth paying for.
- Pull the last 50 Instagram posts and the last 50 TikTok videos of each brand. Compare median likes per post by format.
- Put it all on one page, one column per competitor.
You will usually find one or two clear gaps. Perhaps no rival talks about a feature you do well, or one rival gets far more engagement on short recipe videos than on product shots.
A competitor analysis template
Keep each row short. The value is in the comparison, not in the detail.
| Question | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|
| How many ads are live now? | Ad searches, isActive |
| What is the oldest live ad saying? | Ad text, startedAt |
| Which calls to action do they use? | Ad ctaText |
| How often do they post? | Post exports, createdAt |
| Which format gets the most response? | Post exports, media kind and likes |
| Which topics keep coming back? | Captions and hashtags |
Fill it once to get a baseline. Fill it again next month, and the differences become the story: a new offer, a channel a rival has dropped, a format they suddenly favour.
Instagram, YouTube and TikTok competitor analysis in one sheet
Each platform has its own quirks, but the exports share field names: text, createdAt, metrics.likes,
metrics.comments, url. That is deliberate. You can stack Instagram, Facebook and TikTok posts in one sheet
and compare them without renaming columns first. A competitor analysis chart is then one pivot table away:
median likes per post, by brand and platform.
Keeping it fair and useful
Competitor research is about understanding a market, not copying it. Use what you learn to sharpen your own offer and messaging. Every tool here reads only public pages and public ad libraries, runs on Apify, and is paid for through your Apify account. Each Store page lists the current price per 1,000 results and the free-plan limits, so you can try a small run on every competitor before committing to a full one.