Competitor ad monitoring for the products you track

01Four layers of ad data

Competitor ad monitoring answers one question: which shops are paying to be seen next to the products you sell? It draws on four sources, which differ in reach, frequency and plan:

02Shopping ads from data you already collect

Google Shopping marks some offers as paid. When Pricebeeper's data provider returns Google Shopping results for a product, the sponsored ones are flagged: the sponsored carousel of a product search, and seller offers that carry an ad click in a matched product's seller list. Each flagged offer is stored as an ad observation with the seller, its position among the ads and its price.

Ads are kept apart from sellers' offers. An ad never sets off a price alert, never becomes a seller's price and never enters market statistics. It feeds ad monitoring and, because a Shopping ad that names its seller is an advertised price, MAP monitoring. Your own store's ads are recognized from your product URLs and left out of competitor counts.

Shopping ad data is as fresh as the Google Shopping searches behind it, which run once a month on every paid plan, for keyword searches and matched products alike. Between searches, re-checks read each known seller's own page (weekly on Starter and Plus, daily on Growth and up), and a store's own page says nothing about ads, so ad flags change only at the monthly search.

03Search ads for the products you choose

Text ads on Google Search are a separate layer, and each check is a real Google search, so you choose which products and regions are watched.

1. 1

   Switch ad monitoring on

   On Growth, Pro, Business and Custom, one switch in the ads settings turns on Search ads and monthly ad activity for the account.

2. 2

   Pick products and a region

   Watch products one by one or in bulk, up to a tenth of your slots, packs included: 300 product-regions on Growth, 1,200 on Pro and 3,000 on Business. A bulk request watches as many as fit and lists the rest.

3. 3

   Set the search

   By default Pricebeeper searches the brand and title, the way a shopper would. You can replace that with your own search term of up to 200 characters.

4. 4

   Read the results

   Once a month, the first page of Google results for that search is checked in that region (in the local language for countries such as Germany, France or Japan, otherwise in English), and every ad on it is recorded with the advertiser's domain, the ad title, its link and its position.

A plan change never deletes watches. The checks skip the newest ones over a smaller cap, or all of them on a plan without Search ads, until there is room again.

04Monthly ad activity of your top competitors

On the 2nd of each month, Pricebeeper takes the 10 competitor domains per country that offered the most of your tracked products in the last 30 days, your own store excluded. For each one it reads the Google Shopping and Google Search ads of the last 30 days from Google's Ads Transparency Center.

For each domain and platform you see how many ads it showed (up to 40 are read per platform), how many first ran in those 30 days, their formats (text, image or video), the first and last dates they were shown, and whether Google lists the advertiser as verified.

05Share of voice and competitors known by name

Share of voice is the share of your tracked product-regions on which a competitor had at least one ad in the period. For Shopping ads the base is every product-region the price checks covered in the period; for Search ads it is the product-regions checked. You can pick Shopping, Search or both, one region, and weekly or monthly steps over up to 90 days. The view lists the leading competitors, the top 5 in each region, and a chart of the top 5 over time.

A shop counts once whatever name it advertises under: Shopping ads from "Best Buy" and Search ads from bestbuy.com are one competitor, labelled with its domain and the seller names it used.

Google Shopping sometimes names a seller without its website. Pricebeeper learns the shop domain behind a seller name in each country once the pair has been seen on at least 2 days and in at least 80% of that name's observations. Ads from that seller are then filed under its domain, and ads stored earlier under the name alone are moved to the domain in a daily pass, so the shop doesn't appear twice.

06An alert when a shop starts advertising

Pricebeeper raises a "competitor started advertising" alert when a shop runs a Shopping ad for your product in a region after its last 2 Google Shopping observations there were organic listings only. You get one alert per shop, for its cheapest ad, however many seller names it uses.

These alerts appear in the app and arrive in their own email, batched about 10 minutes after the first one, under a competitor ad alerts preference with its own unsubscribe link. Teammates with alert emails on get a copy, and Slack and webhook destinations receive them like other alerts. Price alerts describes the channels.

07Limits and what it doesn't cover

• Only Google: Shopping ads, Search ads and Google's Ads Transparency Center. Amazon Sponsored Products and Amazon's own-brand section are flagged, so they never count as prices, but they aren't credited to a competitor, because Amazon's search results name no seller.
• A Search ad check is one search in one place once a month. Ads rotate, so a competitor missing from that search may still be advertising at other times.
• Search ads cover only the product-regions you watch, up to a tenth of your slots.
• Ad spend, bids and click data aren't shown. Ads Transparency reports what ran, not what it cost.
• API keys can read ad monitoring data but can't switch it on or change watches.

None of the rival feature pages we checked lists ad monitoring. Intelligence Node sells share of search, which ranks products in search results rather than ads; the Intelligence Node comparison sets out the difference.

08Where it fits

Ad data sits next to prices on each product page, which lists the shops currently advertising it per region. It leans on exact product matching: in a matched product's seller list, each Shopping ad names its seller and the price of your exact item. Search ads and ad activity come with Growth at no extra charge; the pricing page lists every plan.

Questions people ask