What Competitor Data Is Public on Each Channel

On Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn company pages you can see every public post with its caption, format, timestamp and visible engagement, plus follower counts and posting cadence. Reels and video show play counts on some surfaces, which is the closest public proxy for distribution.

What is private on all four: reach, impressions, saves, profile visits, link clicks, audience demographics and story performance. These live in the account own analytics, so any competitor figure for them is inferred from engagement.

The practical consequence is that competitor engagement rate has to be follower-based, because followers is the only denominator you can observe. Comparing a follower-based competitor rate against your own reach-based rate is one of the most common quiet errors in reporting.

Meta publishes every active ad in its Ad Library with creative, format, placements and start date, for every advertiser and without an account. Google publishes verified advertisers ads in the Ads Transparency Center with formats and date ranges.

Spend and targeting are published only for political and social issue advertising on both platforms, plus additional reach disclosure for ads served in the EU. For commercial advertising you get what is running and for how long, and nothing about cost.

Inactive commercial ads generally disappear, which makes ad libraries a live snapshot rather than an archive. That is the strongest argument for recording ad state on a schedule instead of investigating after the fact.

Websites are fully public and the highest signal per minute of any source. Headlines, pricing tiers, limits, feature claims, calls to action and the pages themselves are all readable, and sitemaps sometimes list pages before they appear in navigation.

What websites hide: traffic, conversion rates, test variants you did not happen to be served, and anything behind a login. Traffic estimates from third-party tools are modelled from panels and clickstream samples, and their error is largest exactly where it matters most, on smaller sites.

Review platforms publish the review text, rating, date and often reviewer type, which makes complaint patterns and review velocity fully observable. What they do not publish is how the reviews were solicited, which is why the average rating says as much about a company review programme as about its product.

Job listings are public on company career pages and job boards, including the requirements, which name the tools, target markets and sometimes the product surface being built. Open role counts by function over time are a reliable investment signal.

Open web mentions cover press, forums, communities, newsletters and blogs. Coverage here is never complete for anyone, because private communities, dark social and closed messaging carry a large share of real conversation and are invisible by design.

This incompleteness is worth stating whenever you report mention volume or share of voice. The number describes the sources you can see, and pretending otherwise is how a defensible figure becomes an indefensible claim.

Before adding any metric to a competitive report, check which column it belongs to. If it is in the private column, either drop it or label it as an estimate with the method named. That single habit removes most of the credibility risk in competitive reporting.

Then pick the sources that carry the most signal for the least effort. Websites and ad libraries are the top two on both counts, which is why a competitive programme that only covers those two still beats most programmes that try to cover everything.

Oppira collects across nine of these public channels daily for the competitors you track, and deliberately does not publish figures the sources cannot support, which keeps the reports arguable rather than merely impressive.