While analyzing competitor Google Ads data can reveal your competitor’s positioning, customer interests, and moves, Google’s policies are against scraping data from the Ad platform.
Google bans IPs or accounts that use headless browsers or bots to scrape their SERPs for Ad data. The same goes for those using automated scripts to extract data from the Google Ads user interface.
Question is: How can you access competitor Google Ads data without getting banned? Here’s a step-by-step guide for you!
How to Scrape Google Ads Data Without Getting Banned
Google provides official, structured ways to obtain data from the Google Ads platform. You have the option of using the Google Ads API, Google Ads Scripts, and the Google Ads Reports export feature. Nonetheless, these official data extraction methods limit you to your own account’s data.
The only official source of competitor data is the auction insights reports inside the Google Ads API. Unfortunately, this source is also limited. That’s why marketers use third-party Google Ads APIs to scrape Google Ads for broader competitor analysis. Here’s how it’s done:
- Define the data collection scope
Google Ads hosts account-level, campaign-level, and ad-level data.
Account-level data is used for internal Ad performance monitoring. It is private, meaning you can’t access competitor’s account-level data. Competitor campaign-level and ad-level data, on the other hand, is accessible. Why?
Google’s native API reveals campaign-level data like impression shares across competitors. And, Google’s SERPs reveal ad-level data, displaying the name of the competitor, the keywords they are targeting, and allowing you to interact with their Ads.
Even though you can collect both campaign-level and ad-level data, collecting everything without a clear objective wastes time and money.
Establish a clear objective. Do you want to know your competitors and the keywords they rank for? Do you want to know what messaging is in the Ad? Or, what are you interested in? Having a clear objective in mind helps you focus only on the data points that matter.
- Check out the APIs you can use
As highlighted, you can obtain structured data through Google’s Ads API. However, it has limitations that can slow your operations down.
Google’s Ad API competitor data scope is too narrow and after hitting the rate limits, Google intentionally throttles your requests. Sometimes, Google sends you error responses, reminding you that you’ve exceeded the allocated requests quota.
On average, you get about 15,000 Google Ads API requests per day. If this number suits your needs and you can get the desired data points through the API, then you are in good hands. If these two conditions don’t match what you are looking for, a third-party Google Ads API should do the trick.
Third-party Google Ads APIs offer more data points compared to Google’s official API. They also simplify the process of obtaining campaign-level and ad-level data.
When selecting a third-party Google Ads API, consider if it can get you the data points you need, how easy it is to integrate with your systems, the rate limits, and the cost. Choosing a reliable API saves time during setup and data extraction.
- Obtain API authentication
Before accessing Google Ads data through the official API or a third-party API, you must have access credentials. Without access credentials, the API will not allow you to pull the desired information.
If you want to pull data from Google’s official Ad API, you must register your project or APP in the Google Cloud Console to get client credentials. Then, you’ll be allowed to generate access tokens.
With the access tokens, your App or project can securely pull Google Ads data from your account or the accounts you have access to. Remember, the tokens do expire after some time, requiring you to refresh them.
For a third-party API, the access or authentication setup process is mostly straightforward. The provider assigns you an API key once you create an account with them. Then, you are supposed to follow the provider’s guidelines to correctly use the API key to verify your identity before you can pull data from the provider’s Google Ads API.
- Craft your API requests scraping script
Whether you decide to use an official or third-party Google Ads API, you have to write a script that will connect to the API and pull the data you need. Go through the API’s documentation to learn how to connect your script to the API.
Most API providers include code snippets in their documentation so that you don’t have to start writing your script from scratch. They also highlight what end points you can connect to, rate limits and pagination guidelines, and other best practices.
Overall, an effective API requests scraping script must define the endpoints, have correctly customized queries, properly handle rate limits and pagination, handle errors, and save the data into a database, spreadsheet, or analytics tool. It should also log activities to ease troubleshooting.
APIs have limits on the number of requests you can make within a specific period. Your script should respect rate limits, triggering retries or pauses when necessary to avoid bans or response errors.
- Collect, organize, and use the data
After writing a scraping script and testing it, decide whether you want the script to fetch data daily, weekly, or in real-time. Adding the element of time to the script automates it, allowing it to run continuously for a specified period with little to no human intervention.
Next, let your script run, collecting data points as per the defined scope. In case of an error, check the logs to make necessary adjustments.
Once you have the data you need, clean and organize it. Start with standardizing the data to ensure data elements like dates and currencies have a consistent format.
If there are irrelevant fields, eliminate them. Then, merge the data from different endpoints into one view, ready for analysis to achieve the set objectives.
Wrapping Up!
And, there you have it! Five steps to take you from struggling with Google Ads scraping to smoothly extracting data from the Google Ads platform. As you follow this approach to obtain data from the Google Ads platform, remember to follow API terms and respect rate limits. And, use the data responsibly to avoid legal consequences.
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