How to see your competitors' ads on LinkedIn and keep a record

To see your competitors' ads on LinkedIn, look the company up in LinkedIn's free Ad Library, or put its name into the seogeoaeo.ai LinkedIn Ad Finder for a report that ranks the longest-running ads first. One look tells you what a rival says today. Doing it every month tells you what it stopped saying, and that is usually the more useful half.

This guide covers both: the first check and the routine that follows it.

Step 1: get the names right

LinkedIn ties each ad to an advertiser name, so a typo or a website address will miss. Make a short list of rivals and copy each name from its LinkedIn company page. Add any regional entities you know about, since a business selling in Germany or India may advertise under a local name.

Step 2: run the first search

Open the LinkedIn Ad Library, enter the company and set the country to the market you sell in. LinkedIn lists ads that ran after June 1, 2023 and keeps each one for a year after its final impression. You will see live campaigns plus whatever stopped within the past year.

To skip the scrolling, give the same name to the LinkedIn Ad Finder on seogeoaeo.ai. It returns running and stopped ads in one report and names every advertiser the search matched, which shows you when a branch or a lookalike company got mixed in. A run costs 5 credits, and you see the price before it starts.

Step 3: rank by staying power

A rival pays for every day an ad stays live. An ad that has run for months has kept earning its budget. One that vanished after a week most likely lost a test. LinkedIn does not publish spend or clicks, so run time is the strongest public signal you have, and the Ad Finder puts the longest runners at the top for that reason.

Step 4: note the same things every time

Keep one row per ad in a shared sheet. These columns are enough:

Step 5: repeat monthly and compare

Run the same names on the same day each month and put the new rows next to the old ones. Three kinds of change deserve a closer look:

• A new ad with a new claim. The rival is testing a message. Check next month whether it survived.
• A long runner that stopped. Something replaced it. Find the ad that took its slot.
• A new landing page. Often the first public trace of a new offer, a pricing change or an event.

A short monthly pass like this can catch a positioning shift before it reaches the rival's home page.

The extra layer for EU campaigns

If a competitor targets people in the European Union, LinkedIn shows more about those ads: an estimated impressions total with a split by country, the dates each ad ran, and the kinds of targeting the advertiser chose, such as job, company, location or matched audiences, each marked as include or exclude. That is the closest public view of who a rival is trying to reach. Neither the library nor the Ad Finder shows spend.

Which to use

The free library is the better choice when you need the creative itself, a payer or keyword search, or the EU targeting details. For a regular check on a handful of rivals, the seogeoaeo.ai report is quicker to read, because the ads that keep running are already on top and every matched advertiser name is spelled out.