Google Ads Competitor Tracking: Weekly Slack Digest with Apify & n8n

Get a weekly view of what your Google Ads competitors are running—automatically sent to Slack

This n8n workflow fetches currently active competitors’ Google Ads from the Google Ads Transparency Center using Apify, ranks them, and posts a weekly Slack digest every Monday at 07:00—so your competitive intelligence stays current without manual checking.

What this workflow does

• Schedules it: runs every Monday at 07:00 via a scheduled trigger.
• Builds competitor requests: generates a list of competitors and target regions, then prepares an Apify actor request for each.
• Fetches live ads from Transparency Center: queries Google Ads Transparency Center through Apify and returns a dataset of live ads per competitor, continuing even if some requests fail.
• Deduplicates, ranks, and flags: deduplicates ads, counts read failures, and ranks results by how long each creative has been running, while flagging ads that started within the lookback window.
• Prevents empty spam: checks whether ads or failures were returned; if the run is truly empty, it skips messaging.
• Creates a Slack-friendly digest: groups the digest by advertiser and region, highlights the longest-running creatives with links to their Transparency Center pages, and notes any fetch failures.
• Posts to Slack: sends the weekly digest to your configured channel.

Use cases

• Competitive PPC monitoring for SaaS teams tracking ads across multiple regions.
• Marketing ops and automation engineers building a repeatable Google Ads competitor tracking pipeline.
• Ongoing creative intelligence: quickly spotting new creatives within the lookback window.

Technical details

• n8n scheduled trigger (Monday 07:00)
• Apify via the community node @apify/n8n-nodes-apify (requires an Apify API token)
• Slack node to post into a target channel (e.g., #competitive)
• Logic and workflow control using nodes such as if, code, and no op (plus supporting nodes like sticky note)

Setup tip: install @apify/n8n-nodes-apify, configure your Apify actor ID, and edit the competitor list with the advertiser identifiers you want to track.