Ad Serving and Advertising Intelligence: How Does Pathmatics Work?

You deserve to know where your advertising intelligence comes from. If you’re using data to make decisions about budgets, campaigns, and competitors, you should feel confident that it reflects what’s really happening in the market.

Pathmatics is built on a simple idea: show the ads real people actually see, then help you understand what those ads mean — who’s running them, how often, in which formats, and at what level of investment. Here’s how that all comes together inside the platform.

It Starts with Ads Seen by Real People

Whenever someone from our opt-in panel is served an ad — whether it’s on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, a news site, Hulu, or anywhere else we support — we collect details about that ad: the creative itself, where it appeared, and when it first showed up.

Because our panel spans mobile apps, desktop browsing, and connected TVs, we get a wide, representative sample of the digital advertising ecosystem. And we do all of this in a privacy-safe, permission-based way: no personally identifiable information is ever collected or stored.

That gives us something incredibly valuable: a live, constantly updated stream of real ads delivered to real people.

We pair that with probabilistic web sampling to make sure we’re also capturing the ads panelists could see but simply didn’t encounter that day. That combination keeps our intelligence grounded in reality and broad enough to spot market-level trends.

From Raw Ads to Actionable Intelligence

Once we’ve collected ads, we enrich them. Each creative is analyzed to determine:

• who the advertiser is

• which brand the creative belongs to

• which category it should roll up into

• which channel it ran on

• and what links, text, and formats it used

Then we estimate impressions and spend using industry-aligned modeling — so you can see not just that an ad ran, but its likely scale and cost. This is the foundation for everything you see in the platform.

What You’ll See Inside Pathmatics

Below are examples of the types of views you’ll encounter — and what each tells you about advertisers, competitors, creative strategy, and spend.

Top Advertisers View: Who’s Spending and Where

In this view, you’ll see the biggest advertisers in any category or time period you choose, ranked by estimated spend or impressions. Because our data comes from real ad exposures, these trends reflect what’s actually running in the market, not what’s declared in self-reported dashboards.

What this helps you understand:

• Who’s ramping up activity right now

• Which channels they’re prioritizing

• How their spend compares to others in the category

• Whether competitive pressure is rising or easing

It's an instant pulse-check on market momentum.

Advertiser Breakdown: How a Brand Buys Media

When you open any advertiser, you’ll find a breakdown of how that brand distributes its spend across channels, creatives, partners, and publishers. You’ll be able to see things like:

• how much of their investment goes to social vs. display vs. OTT

• which platforms (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) receive the most spend

• which publishers they lean on for web campaigns

Why this matters: If a competitor is suddenly pouring money into short-form video, OTT, or a new social channel, you’ll see it here — often before you hear it anywhere else.

Creative Insights: What Ads Look Like in the Wild

This view shows real creatives captured from panelists and aggregators: every image, video, carousel, and HTML5 asset a brand is running. You can explore:

• top-spending creatives

• creative rotation trends

• messaging shifts

• format mix (video vs. static vs. carousel)

• which creatives are tied to which landing pages

Why this matters: It’s one thing to know a competitor increased their spend on TikTok — it’s another to see exactly what they’re saying, promoting, and testing.

Publisher Insights: Where Ads Appear

Curious how a site or app monetizes its inventory? This view shows which advertisers are spending on a given publisher, across which formats, and at what scale.

You can also see how heavily advertisers rely on each publisher — a helpful signal if you’re evaluating new placements or negotiating deals.

Brand Comparisons: Two Strategies, Side by Side

Pick any up to twenty advertisers, and Pathmatics will lay out their strategies next to each other.

This is often where “a-ha!” moments happen.

If your competitor suddenly shifts into OTT or triples their TikTok spend, you’ll see exactly when and how that change occurred.

A Clear Window into the Digital Advertising Market

Everything in Pathmatics starts with real digital experiences — the ads people actually encounter across apps, browsers, and connected TVs — combined with our data aggregators’ visits to top sites that mirror how people browse the web. Together, these sources give us a grounded, representative view of the ads running across the ecosystem and the brands behind them.

We don’t just show you ads. We show you how advertisers behave, where they invest, what they communicate, and how fast they change course.

And because every number in Pathmatics is built on transparent inputs and predictable modeling, you always know exactly what you’re looking at — no black boxes, no magic, no mystery.

Want to see your category? Take a demo and explore how the market really works.