Disclosure: I build and maintain the Apify Actor used in this tutorial ( ocius-data/google-ads-transparency-reliable ).

Since 2023, Google publishes every ad shown through Google Ads in the Ads Transparency Center : text, image and video ads, the countries where each one ran, and the first and last date it was shown. It is the most complete free source of competitor ad intelligence available, and it has one problem: there is no official API and no export button. You can browse one advertiser at a time, and that is all.

This tutorial shows how to turn it into a dataset you can query, and how to receive only the ads that started or stopped since the last check.

What you can get

For each ad:

advertiserId , advertiserName and creativeId

format ( TEXT , IMAGE or VIDEO )

firstShown , lastShown , daysShown and an isActive flag

regions and per-region dates and, inside the EU, impression ranges and platforms

Ad text ( headline , description , callToAction ), imageUrl , videoUrl and landingUrl

With the…