The Secrets of Targeting: How to Analyse Competitors’ Ad Creatives in Other Countries

Expanding into international markets is always a challenge for businesses, marketers and affiliate marketers. Strategies that have delivered excellent results in your own country for years may fail completely abroad due to differences in mindset, local trends and cultural differences. To avoid wasting thousands of dollars on blind tests and draining the marketing budget, professionals use a tried-and-tested tactic: a detailed analysis of competitors’ advertising campaigns.

In-depth monitoring allows you to see which approaches are already working in the target market, which triggers resonate with the audience, and which visual formats generate the most conversions. However, it is not so easy to legally spy on other people’s ad sets in other countries. The algorithms of Facebook, Google, TikTok and other advertising networks strictly restrict ad display based on geographical location.

In this article, we’ll take a detailed look at how to bypass regional restrictions, which tools to use for analysing foreign targets, and how to set up the technical infrastructure for safely spying on competitors’ creative content.

• Why Analyse Competitor's Overseas Adverts?
• Key Tools for Finding and Analysing Creatives
  • Official Ad Network Libraries
  • Specialised Spy Services
• The Main Obstacle to Analysis: How Ad Networks Hide Ads
• How Proxy Servers Open Up Access to Global Targeting
  • Changing Your Geolocation (Geo-Spoofing)
  • Masking Automated Requests
  • Simulating Real User Parameters

Why analyse competitor's overseas adverts?

Studying competitors’ international experience is not about blindly copying others’ ideas, but rather in-depth analytical work. High-quality benchmarking solves several strategic tasks at once:

1. Saving on testing costs. Your competitors have already spent their budgets testing hundreds of hypotheses, formats and ad copy. By analysing adverts that have been running for a long time, you can immediately identify viable and profitable combinations.
2. Understanding the audience’s local pain points. Every country has its own triggers. For example, in one region, free delivery is important to shoppers; in another, the product’s environmental friendliness; and in a third, the option to pay on delivery. Competitors’ creatives clearly demonstrate these priorities.
3. Identifying new trends (Trending). Western and Asian markets often lead the way in design and content presentation. Analysing international markets allows you to bring in fresh ideas and be the first to implement them in your niche.
4. Assessing the level of competition. You will be able to clearly see how aggressively other players in your niche are behaving, what USPs they offer, and what advertising budgets you will be up against.

Key tools for finding and analysing creatives

Modern digital marketing offers a wealth of legitimate tools for studying advertising. These can be divided into two main categories: official libraries and specialised spy services.

Official ad network libraries

The most accessible way to look behind the scenes at your competitors is to use the platforms’ own open registries:

1. Meta Ad Library (Facebook Ad Library). This allows you to find any active adverts on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Simply enter a competitor’s page name or a keyword.
2. TikTok Creative Center. A powerful platform where you can track the most trending videos in specific countries, filter them by niche, engagement rate (CTR) and campaign objectives.
3. Google Ads Transparency Centre. An official tool showing which text, banner and video ads a specific advertiser has run on Google Search and YouTube.

Specialised spy services

While official libraries only show active ads, professional spy services (AdHeart, SpyOver, Anstrex, BigSpy) collect historical data. They allow you to see how many days a creative has been running, how much traffic it has generated, which landing pages it leads to, and what specific targeting criteria (age, gender, interests) it was set to.

The main obstacle to analysis: how ad networks hide ads

Despite the abundance of tools, when attempting to analyse adverts in another country, you will inevitably encounter strict filtering algorithms. Advertising systems and anti-fraud technologies protect campaign confidentiality and combat automated data collection (parsing).

When you access the Meta Ads Library from your usual IP address, the system automatically tailors the results to your current geolocation. You may not see some of the adverts because they are strictly targeted at residents of the US or Germany, whilst your digital footprint indicates a different location.

Furthermore, if you use automated spy services or scripts to mass-download other people’s videos and banners, your IP address will quickly end up on a blacklist. The platform will start displaying endless CAPTCHAs, hiding real data, or completely blocking access to the resource. To bypass these barriers and see the results ‘through the eyes of a foreigner’, you need to spoof your network settings.

How proxy servers open up access to global targeting

A proxy server acts as a network intermediary. It receives requests from your browser or spyware, routes them through itself, and sends them to the advertising platform. To the algorithms of Facebook, TikTok or Google, this request appears as though it were made by a regular user located in the selected country.

Changing your geolocation (geo-spoofing)

By using a proxy from a specific country (e.g. France, Japan or Brazil), you completely change your virtual address. This allows you to access local search engine results, view real ad banners on foreign websites and open ads in the Ad Library without any loss of functionality or data masking.

Masking automated requests

If your aim is to download hundreds of competitors’ creatives for in-depth analysis by designers, you will need to route traffic through a pool of rotating proxy addresses. Distributing requests across dozens of different IP addresses protects your analytics software from being blocked by the target platforms.

Simulating real user parameters

To maximise trust from ad networks, the proxy must support modern network protocols. This allows you to synchronise your browser’s time zone, language packs and operating system settings with the proxy server’s network address.

For stable operation without being blocked by advertising platforms, dedicated proxies from the Space Proxy service are ideal, as they provide clean IP addresses with 99% uptime and high speeds. They are issued exclusively to a single user, support HTTP(S)/SOCKS5 and integrate seamlessly with any anti-detection browsers or software for automated creative collection.