Where competitors advertise: pixel fingerprints → Sheets

The problem this solves

You can learn a lot about a competitor's media strategy without seeing a single ad. The tracking pixels on their site - conversion tags, retargeting snippets, analytics beacons - reveal which platforms they are wired to buy on. A retargeting pixel plus a conversion tag plus an insight tag is a channel strategy written in JavaScript. Checking this by hand means opening developer tools on ten sites, page by page, and knowing what each script signature actually means.

Because the check is tedious, it rarely happens, and channel planning falls back on assumption: everyone advertises where we advertise. The pixel record says otherwise more often than you would expect. A rival quietly instrumenting a new platform is preparing to spend there; one that stripped a tag has probably concluded the channel failed. Both facts are worth knowing before you set next quarter's mix, and both sit in plain sight in the page source.

How the mission runs

1. List the targets. You give the mission your competitor domains - the playbook takes ten, but any list works. The agent confirms each domain resolves and notes the key pages worth scanning beyond the homepage, since some tags only fire on pricing, signup, or checkout paths.
2. Fingerprint each site. Ad Pixels scans every domain and identifies the tracking technologies present: conversion pixels, retargeting tags, and analytics instrumentation, each mapped to the ad platform it belongs to. Detection covers the common tag-manager wrappers, so tags loaded indirectly are still caught and attributed.
3. Infer the channel strategy. Presence and absence both get read. The agent translates raw tag lists into a channel inference per competitor - actively buying, instrumented but quiet, or absent - and grades its own confidence on each call, since a pixel proves plumbing rather than live spend.
4. Build the matrix in Sheets. A channel-by-competitor matrix lands in Google Sheets: one row per competitor, one column per platform, cells showing what was detected and when. A second tab holds the raw tag evidence per domain so any cell in the matrix can be verified in one click.

The prompt

This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.

What comes back

A Google Sheets workbook with a channel-by-competitor matrix as the front tab - ten competitors down the side, ad platforms across the top, each cell marking detected instrumentation - plus an evidence tab listing the exact tags found on each domain and the pages they fired on. Re-run the mission and the sheet updates in place, with changes since the previous scan called out.

Make it yours

• Track the same ten domains monthly and ask the agent to highlight newly added or removed pixels, which is the earliest public sign of a channel shift.
• Include two or three companies you admire outside your category to see which channel stacks sophisticated marketers in other markets are actually running.
• Ask for a summary row that scores each platform by how many competitors are instrumented there, a quick read on where your category fights hardest.

Frequently asked questions

Go deeper

• Ad library surveillance: reading the market’s paid conversation
• Competitive intelligence with AI agents: the complete guide
• Anatomy of a competitor teardown worth paying for