Competitor Ad Analysis: Where Rivals Advertise

Competitor ad analysis never starts with curiosity. It starts with a very practical question: where should a limited budget go. You notice that the shop or service next door is constantly showing up somewhere, and you draw the natural conclusion — go there too. But "there too" almost always means the most expensive auction in town, one you enter last and pay the most in for exactly the same contact.

The good news: to find out where your competitors advertise in Kyiv you need neither paid tools nor an agency. You need roughly 60 minutes, an incognito browser window, and one walk around your own neighbourhood. Below is the step-by-step procedure, a table to collect the results, and — most importantly — what to do with the finding that everyone is sitting in the same two channels.

The three questions this audit actually answers

Monitoring competitor advertising is only worth doing if you know in advance which decisions depend on it. There are three:

1. Whether there is money in the channel. If five competitors have been running ads in the same place for three months, the channel most likely pays off. Nobody burns budget for half a year for fun.
2. Which messages they have already taken. If everyone says "20% off", your 25% will not be remembered. Once you see their wording, you know what to push against.
3. Where they are absent. This is the most valuable part, and the one everyone skips. An empty channel costs less than a crowded one — not because it is worse, but because demand has not arrived yet.

Step 1. Meta Ad Library: everything running on Facebook and Instagram

Meta is required to publicly display every active ad. Open the Meta Ad Library, set the country to Ukraine, choose "All ads" and type in the competitor's page name.

What to record:

• How many creatives run at once. One or two means a test. Ten to fifteen means systematic work with a budget.
• The launch date of each one. An ad running for more than 30 days is almost certainly profitable: weak ones get switched off within a week.
• Offer and format. Video or static, discount or benefit, and where the button goes — website, Direct, Messenger.

One limitation to keep in mind: the library shows the fact of delivery, not budget and not results. Running for a long time is a strong signal, not proof.

Step 2. Search: who pays for your keywords

Take 5 queries people actually use to find you (not "best service in Kyiv" but "flat renovation Obolon price"), open an incognito window and run them one by one.

Look at the ad block at the top:

• Empty — the niche has not been bought up yet, and search ads may be a cheap entry point.
• 1–2 ads — moderate competition.
• 4 ads plus promo cards — the auction is hot, cost per click will be high, and your position will depend on budget rather than quality.

Also check the Google Ads Transparency Center: by advertiser name it shows the ads a company runs in search, on YouTube and across the display network. That covers three channels in a single window.

Step 3. TikTok and video

TikTok's Creative Center has a top-ads section with country and industry filters. You will not find your specific neighbour there, but in 10 minutes you will understand which formats currently work in your category and how the hooks sound. For a local Kyiv business this is a bank of creative ideas rather than reconnaissance.

Step 4. Maps and reviews: an indirect but honest sign of activity

A Google Maps profile is not advertising in itself, but it shows well how much a competitor works on customer flow at all: fresh photos, replies to reviews, how many new reviews arrived last month. A business that invests in advertising systematically almost always keeps its map listing in order — and the reverse holds too. We compared this channel with the others in Where to advertise a local business: 4 channels.

Step 5. The field audit: 40 minutes on foot around your location

This is the only way to see offline — which is exactly why almost nobody does it. Take a radius of about 1 km around your location and walk it with your phone, photographing everything that counts as advertising.

What you typically find in a Kyiv neighbourhood:

• shop windows and A-frames belonging to the venues themselves;
• notices in residential entrances and lifts;
• flyers near the metro and at checkout counters;
• citylights and boards on the larger streets;
• screens inside venues — in coffee shops, bars, waiting areas.

Record not only what is there, but whose it is. In 9 cases out of 10 it turns out that the screens in nearby coffee shops are running ads from a completely different category — or the venue's own content. We covered the logic of the radius separately in Hyperlocal advertising within 1 km.

Put it all into one table

At the end you have a simple matrix: channel — how many competitors are in it — for how long. That is where the actual decision starts.

Two conclusions that follow

First: crowded does not mean good for you. A channel where all five competitors already sit is a channel where bids have been pushed to the ceiling. You would enter last, with the smallest budget and the weakest account history. Presence there is often necessary, but as a minimum, not as the backbone of a strategy.

Second: empty does not mean bad. Before writing off a channel nobody is in, ask one question: are competitors absent because the channel does not work, or because they never thought about it? That is cheap to check — a two-week test with a separate phone number or QR code. We described the procedure in How to test an ad channel in 2 weeks.

The blind spot of any audit

Note the asymmetry: everything your competitor does online, you will see in 30 minutes in public libraries. Everything they do indoors — on screens in coffee shops, bars and waiting areas — appears in no library at all. There is no service that will show you whose ad ran on a screen in Podil last month.

The reverse also follows: your advertising on those screens is invisible to competitors too. They will not bid against you for the same impression, because they will never learn it exists. For a local business that is a rare situation — a channel with no auction race.

How to take the empty channel

HostAd is a map of almost thirty screens in craft coffee shops and bars across Kyiv: Podil, Obolon, Pechersk, Shevchenkivskyi and Holosiivskyi districts. You see every point separately — address, venue, audience and price — before booking anything. For example, COFFEEIST on Hlybochytska or ZHNYVA in Nestorivskyi Lane.

What this gives you right after a competitor audit:

• The owner's price, visible upfront. The base rate starts at 40 UAH per second of airtime per month. A 10-second spot costs from 400 UAH per month on a single screen. No 15–30% agency markups and no proposals by email.
• Monthly booking. No quarterly contract required: you test the "empty channel" hypothesis for exactly one month.
• Frequency instead of a single contact. The spot goes on air in a loop roughly every 2 minutes, and a guest of the coffee shop near their home comes in 2–4 times a week.
• Launch in hours. Pick a point on the map, upload the creative, pay — no calls, no briefs.

We broke down budgets by format in How much screen advertising costs in Kyiv, and the minimum test in A campaign for 1,000 UAH.

A 60-minute checklist

1. Write down 5 real competitors in your neighbourhood, not "market leaders".
2. Run each of them through the Meta Ad Library: creative counts and dates.
3. Check 5 of your commercial queries in incognito search.
4. Look up competitor names in the Google Ads Transparency Center.
5. Walk 1 km around your location and photograph every ad medium.
6. Collect it in a table: channel — how many competitors — for how long.
7. Pick one crowded channel for a minimum presence and one empty channel for a one-month test.

Competitor ad analysis is only worth the hour if it ends in an action. If step 5 showed that not a single competitor is on the venue screens in your area, check the map to see which of those venues are free right now and book one for a month. It is the cheapest way to find out whether that emptiness really comes from a lack of demand.