n8n Google Ads Competitor Monitor: Apify to Sheets, Slack & Gmail Alerts

Monitor Google Ads competitors automatically—write to Sheets, alert Slack, and email Gmail in real time

The n8n Google Ads Competitor Monitor: Apify to Sheets, Slack & Gmail Alerts runs the Google Ads Transparency Center Scraper Actor on Apify every day. It records each new competitor ad in Google Sheets, sends a per-advertiser digest to Slack, and emails you via Gmail when a competitor suddenly launches many ads at once.

What this workflow does

• Daily scheduled monitoring: A Schedule Trigger fires once per day and loads your saved settings from the Workflow settings node (competitors, regions, cap per competitor, launch window, launch threshold, and alert email).
• Scrape competitor ad data from Apify: For each competitor (brand name, domain, or advertiser ID), the workflow runs the Google Ads Transparency Center Scraper Actor, waits for completion, and retrieves dataset items.
• No duplicate rows / no duplicate charges: With onlyNew enabled, the actor returns only ads the workflow has never delivered before for that competitor and region set—so scheduled runs don’t repeat results.
• Store every new ad in Google Sheets: Creative rows are filtered and appended with advertiser, domain, creative ID, format (image/text/video), first/last shown dates, days shown, preview link, and Transparency Center link.
• Slack digest per advertiser: A code step groups new ads by advertiser, counts them, and posts one digest only when new ads appear within the launch window (default 7 days).
• Gmail alert for launch spikes: If an advertiser reaches the launch threshold (default 10 ads first shown in the last 7 days) and an alert address is set, the workflow sends you a Gmail alert.

Use cases

• SaaS teams tracking competitor ad launches by region and advertiser ID
• Growth operators monitoring creative changes and timing without manual checks
• n8n automation engineers building a reliable competitor intelligence pipeline

Technical details

• Nodes / tools: if, set, code, Gmail, Slack, filter (plus Schedule Trigger and the Apify actor execution flow)
• Core integrations: Apify (Google Ads Transparency Center Scraper Actor), Google Sheets, Slack, Gmail
• Error branch: Reports failed runs via the workflow’s error handling branch