Find companies that are running ads

A company running ads is only a prospect if it's the kind of company you can help, so Kite starts with fit. It already knows your positioning, your products, and your best customers from its research on your business. It uses that knowledge to describe the companies worth looking for.

Kite then searches for companies by industry, size, and location. It can narrow the search by headcount growth, funding, technology use, or hiring. An agency that runs Meta ads for dental practices might want independent practices in Texas with more than one location. A tool built for B2B software teams that advertise on LinkedIn might want companies with 50 to 500 employees that recently raised money.

You can also hand Kite a list you already have. That might be the accounts in your CRM, a spreadsheet from a trade show, or a set of companies that look like your best customers. Kite can stack ad activity on top of other timely events, too. A company that just raised money and is hiring a head of growth is more likely to need help with its ads than one that's doing neither.

To find advertisers you haven't heard of, Kite searches Meta's ad library by keyword, using the words your prospects would put in their own ads. For the dental agency, that might be "same-day crowns" or "Invisalign consultation." For a company that sells to home-services businesses, it might be "free estimate" or "emergency plumber." Each search covers one country, such as the United States.

A keyword search returns a sample of the advertisers whose ads match that phrase. It doesn't return the whole market. Kite tries a couple of different wordings and tells you the results are a sample. It then checks each advertiser it found against your ideal customer profile before adding it to your list, because a phrase like "free estimate" also matches companies you'd never sell to.

If you sell to ecommerce brands, Kite can also find fast-growing Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands by category and country, along with the Meta ads tied to their growth.

For each company on the list, Kite looks up its ads from its website address and records what the library shows. Starting from the website address matters. Many brands share a name, and a lookup by name alone can return another company's ads without any sign that something went wrong.

Kite checks the platform that matters to what you sell. Meta, which covers Facebook and Instagram, is the default. Kite checks Google search ads or LinkedIn ads instead when those are your business. A company selling LinkedIn ad management, for example, cares about LinkedIn and not much else.

For each company, Kite records the platform, the live ads it found, the start date of the oldest live ad, the date it checked, and a link to the ad library. It words the finding as exactly what the library showed, such as "advertising on Meta as of October 24, 2026, with the oldest live ad starting on August 3." An ad that has stayed live for months tells you the company keeps paying to run it.

Sometimes a lookup returns nothing. The library may not have collected that brand yet, or the company may advertise somewhere Kite didn't check. Kite leaves those companies marked as unknown instead of labeling them as not advertising, so you don't drop a good prospect because of a gap in the data.

Kite calls a company a new advertiser only when its full ad history, ended ads included, starts inside the window you care about, such as the last 90 days. That rule matters because a recent start date on a live ad usually means a new ad, not a new advertiser. A company that has advertised for three years will still have ads that started last week.

So when you ask which companies just started advertising, Kite pulls both live and past ads for each company. It only says a company started advertising when the library has no older ads for it and the earliest ad falls inside your window. When the library doesn't return enough history or dates to tell, Kite says the company is advertising and leaves the start date open.

Kite can also check whether a company put paid ads behind a recent event. It takes the date of a launch or a funding announcement, pulls the company's ads, and keeps the ones that started after it. A company that just raised money and launched its first Meta campaign two weeks later is a timely prospect for an agency.

A company's own ads show what it sells, who it's trying to reach, and what it's offering, and that gives your outreach a specific opening. Kite reads each company's ad copy and offers. It can also open the landing pages behind its longest-running ads and check how fast those pages load on a phone.

That gives Kite something concrete to say. An email from the dental agency might point out that all eight of a practice's live Meta ads offer a free consultation but send people to a homepage with no booking form. An email from a creative studio might note that a brand has run the same two images since spring.

Kite finds the right person at each company by title, function, and seniority. Each record includes the person's role, company, LinkedIn profile, and a professional email address when one is available. Kite scores each prospect from one to five against your criteria and explains the score. It then drafts outreach that opens with the ad finding and saves the list to your connected CRM or spreadsheet. When you approve the emails, Kite sends them from your team's Kite email address or your connected email product.

Companies start and stop advertising all the time, so Kite can run the same check on a schedule and report what changed. Each time it looks up a company's ads, Kite saves a dated record in your team's wiki that shows which ads were live on that day. The next check compares against that record and reports the new ads, the ads that ended, and the companies that started advertising since the last look.

You can schedule the check weekly or on whatever cadence suits you. For example, Kite can run your market's keywords through Meta's ad library every Monday and send you the new advertisers that fit your profile. Results arrive in a Slack channel, by email, or as a conversation in the Kite web app.