Does this give me impressions, spend or reach?

No, and neither can anything else reading this source: Google publishes no impression count, no spend figure and no audience reach anywhere in the Ads Transparency Center for a normal commercial ad. What it does publish is which creatives ran, in which country, and the dates each was first and last shown — and the gap between those two dates is the most useful signal available here, because an advertiser who keeps a creative live for months is telling you it works. The creative row does carry one undocumented integer that this Actor deliberately does not return; it is between 5 and 1,737 across the ads sampled, it matches neither the image area nor its dimensions, and shipping it labelled 'impressions' would be inventing a number.

Why is the proxy on by default when other Actors here have it off?

Because Google throttles this endpoint per IP, and it does so invisibly. A spent IP does not get an error or a 429 — the request is redirected to google.com/sorry/, so a scraper that only checks the response body sees a perfectly valid page and reports an empty result. That happened during development from an ordinary connection and persisted for several minutes. Shared cloud IPs are frequently already spent by someone else, so an unproxied run is the likeliest reason for a run that comes back with nothing. This Actor also checks where each response landed rather than only what it contains, so when it is throttled it says so in a free row instead of pretending the advertiser has no ads.

Why does a row say 8,000 to 9,000 instead of a number?

Because that is what Google says. It publishes an advertiser's library size as a bucketed range and never as an exact count, so both bounds are carried on every row rather than one of them being presented as a total. It is the only honest way to answer 'did I get all of them?': compare your row count against the range. It also varies enormously by country — on 2026-09-07 the same advertiser was stated at 8,000-9,000 creatives in the US, 20,000-30,000 in Germany and 400-500 in Japan.

Which countries can I search?

48 were verified one by one against the live service on 2026-09-07 and every one returned creatives: the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Czechia, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Give a standard two-letter country code. Anything unrecognised is refused with a free row naming the valid ones, rather than being sent to Google and coming back as a misleading empty list.

Can I search by company name instead of by domain?

Yes. A value that is not a domain and not an advertiser id is put through Google's own advertiser search, and the best match is used — the row then says matched_by: name_search so you know a resolution step happened. Names are ambiguous, though: searching 'Nike' returns NIKE SRL in Italy and several unrelated advertisers alongside Nike, Inc., and the run log lists how many candidates were considered. Where you know the domain or the advertiser id, use it — those are exact.

Why can't I fetch the creative image with curl?

Google serves those images to browsers and refuses plain command-line clients — a request with default headers hangs rather than returning an error. The URL is real and is taken verbatim from Google's own response, not assembled by this Actor; one checked on 2026-09-07 rendered as a 696×458 image in a browser. Use browser-style headers if you are downloading them programmatically, or just open one in a tab. Note also that display_width and display_height are the size the ad is shown at, not the asset's own resolution — that same creative is served as 348×489 in the ad slot.

What happens if Google changes the RPC?

You get a free, unbilled row with notice_type 'source_changed'. This matters more here than for a normal scraper: the endpoint identifies its fields by NUMBER rather than by name, so if Google renumbers them the response is still valid JSON of the right shape and every value silently lands in the wrong column. The Actor checks that the rows it got still carry a creative id where one belongs, and stops rather than emitting a dataset that looks fine and is wrong.

How many ads can one run return?

As many as the advertiser has, in pages of 40, with the cap applied per advertiser rather than per run — so a batch of ten cannot be used up by the first large one. Libraries get big: Google stated 8,000-9,000 creatives for a single advertiser in the US alone. Set the cap to control spend, and read it against the advertiser_creatives range on the rows to see what fraction you covered.

Is this the same data as the Transparency Center website?

Yes — it is the same service, read through the same internal endpoint the website's own front end calls, so what you get is what the site would show for that advertiser and country. Nothing here is inferred, modelled or enriched from anywhere else, and the source page for every single row is on the row so you can open it and check.

Do I need a Google account or an Ads account?

No. The Transparency Center is public and this Actor sends no credentials of any kind. It reads only what Google publishes about ads that ran; there is no account data, no audience data and no personal information involved.

Use case

How Long Has That Ad Been Running? Creative Longevity from the Transparency Center

Google publishes no impressions or spend — but it does publish first-shown and last-shown per creative, and the gap between them is the signal most people are really after.

The question everyone asks about a competitor’s advertising is “what’s working?” — and the honest answer is that Google will not tell you. There are no impressions in the Ads Transparency Center, no spend, no clicks and no reach, for any ordinary commercial advertiser. Tools that offer you those numbers for a Google ad are not getting them from here.

What Google does publish, per creative, is the date it was first shown and the date it was last shown. That is a weaker signal than spend, and it is a far better one than nothing, because it is behavioural: an advertiser who has kept a creative live for two years has voted with their budget, repeatedly, in a way no engagement metric can fake.

The idea

Run length — last_shown minus first_shown — separates three populations inside a competitor’s library:

Evergreen. Running for a year or more and still live. These are the creatives the advertiser has decided work. If you are looking for what to imitate, look here.
Tests. A few days or weeks, and stopped. Interesting in aggregate — a burst of short-lived creatives around one date is a campaign launch — and misleading individually.
Retired. Ran a long time, then stopped. Worth a second look: something changed, and the date it stopped often lines up with a product or pricing change you can find elsewhere.

None of that needs a metric Google withholds. It needs two dates and a subtraction.

The input

{
  "queries": ["nike.com", "geico.com"],
  "region": "US",
  "maxResults": 200
}

Use a domain rather than a company name where you know it. A name goes through Google’s own advertiser search and takes the best match — searching “Nike” on 7 September 2026 returned NIKE SRL in Italy and several unrelated advertisers alongside Nike, Inc. Every row records the route in matched_by, so a name-resolved row is visible as such.

Pick the region deliberately. Google keeps a separate library per country and the same advertiser’s volume differs wildly between them — on 7 September 2026, one advertiser was stated at 8,000–9,000 creatives in the US, 20,000–30,000 in Germany and 400–500 in Japan. “Their ads” is not a country-independent question.

What comes back

{
  "advertiser_name": "Nike, Inc.",
  "advertiser_domain": "nike.com",
  "creative_id": "CR06973324123149697025",
  "creative_type": "image",
  "creative_image_url": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/...",
  "first_shown": "2024-04-05T19:52:49Z",
  "last_shown": "2026-09-07T06:20:18Z",
  "region": "US",
  "advertiser_creatives_low": 8000,
  "advertiser_creatives_high": 9000,
  "matched_by": "domain"
}

That creative has been running since April 2024 and was live the morning this was written — nearly two and a half years. Sorted by run length, rows like that come to the top and the week-long tests fall to the bottom, which is the whole analysis.

Two things to be careful about

last_shown moves. For a currently-running creative it is close to now, so it is a snapshot rather than a fixed fact. If you want a real history, run this on a schedule and keep the results; creative_id is Google’s own and stable, so appending runs and de-duplicating on it gives you a genuine longitudinal record rather than a series of unrelated pulls.

You are almost certainly sampling. advertiser_creatives_low and _high state what Google says the whole library holds in that region — a range, because Google refuses to publish an exact count. With maxResults: 200 against a stated 8,000–9,000, you have roughly 2% of it, and “the longest- running creative in my sample” is a different claim from “their longest-running creative”. Raise the cap when the claim matters; at $0.0015 per creative a full 9,000-creative library is about $13.50, so it is a decision rather than an accident.

What you cannot conclude

Run length is a proxy and it has limits worth stating. A long-running creative is evidence of commitment, not of performance — some are evergreen brand assets that were never optimised against anything. A short run may be a test, or it may be a seasonal campaign that ended exactly as planned. And a creative that is absent entirely is not evidence of anything: you may simply have sampled the first 200 of nine thousand.

The Transparency Center also holds only what ran through Google’s ad systems. A competitor’s spend on other platforms is invisible here, so “how much are they advertising” is not a question this answers — only “what have they run, and for how long”, which is the part Google actually publishes.

The full how-to guide covers the rest of the input, including why the proxy is on by default and how a throttled run tells you so instead of returning an empty result.

The actor itself — Google Ads Transparency Center & Competitor Ad Scraper — lists its live health, its nightly canary record and its current price.

If the advertisers you are tracking sell online, Shopify Store Intel covers what they actually sell — useful next to what they say in their ads.

Last updated 2026-09-07