Creative Intelligence
Pathmatics
Pathmatics, now part of Sensor Tower, is a digital advertising intelligence platform that reveals where brands spend their ad dollars across display, video, social, and mobile. It tracks live creatives, estimated spend, impressions, and the publishers and ad networks each advertiser relies on, so marketers can benchmark competitors and surface winning formats. Teams use it to study rival campaigns, validate share-of-voice claims, and find white-space opportunities before committing their own media budgets.
What it does
Pathmatics monitors digital ad activity across the open web, social platforms, and mobile, attributing observed impressions to specific advertisers and estimating how much each is spending by channel and publisher. For any brand you search, it surfaces the actual creatives running, the formats and placements in use, the share split between direct and programmatic buys, and the trend of spend over time. Marketers pair this with their own data to size competitors' budgets, spot new campaigns the day they launch, and decide which publishers or creative angles are worth testing. Because it samples real ad delivery rather than self-reported figures, it works as an independent check on agency or vendor share-of-voice claims.
Where it fits
It sits at the research stage, informing media and creative strategy before you plan or launch your own campaigns.
Core features
- Estimated ad spend by advertiser, channel, and publisher
- Live gallery of competitors' running creatives and formats
- Direct vs programmatic buying mix for each brand
- Spend and impression trends over custom date ranges
- Publisher and ad-network breakdowns for media planning
Best for
- Brand and agency teams benchmarking competitor media spend
- Strategists hunting for winning creative angles and formats
- Analysts validating independent share-of-voice estimates
Beginner notes
- Treat the spend figures as directional estimates, not exact invoices — they are modeled from observed delivery.
- Filter by channel first; a brand's display strategy can look very different from its social one.
- Save competitor creatives you admire into a swipe file to brief your own design team.