Spy tools are very useful. I use Adplexity now, it has a ton of useful info but is certainly not free. Whatrunswhere.com and MagicAdz are 2 that I have used in the past.
Spy tools usually tell you the duration of the campaigns.
For free "competitive analysis" there are many ways to go about that. I'll give you a couple of examples of how I have found winning information.
Facebook: You can check on your competitors using the Facebook ads library or the "info and ads" option on a competitors page and see what ads pages are running. This method does not give you targeting or duration, but shows you creatives and flow used. You can also click on ads you see similar to your competition and use that information, along with help from the FB algorithm you will be seeing more competitors ads than you will able to deal with. Swipe-Worthy and BigSpy are 2 free tools that work but aren't quite as refined as the paid ones.
Search: You can find the ads targeted to any keyword by searching that keyword and checking out the ads that get shown to you. If you don't live in your target GEO you can use a VPN to spy on those campaigns. If you don't have a VPN you can bug the crap out of your cousin Larry in Nebraska to do it for you and send you screenshots of the ads, landers and offers. You may get retargeted by publishers on FB after you click on their ads in a search engine. Getting retargeted is usually a good sign that they are at the top of their game.
Native: A friend of mine does this for his Native campaigns. He does not live in the US but runs traffic there. He just changes his IP to US with a VPN and searches for sites with widgets from Revcontent, Taboola, MGID etc and gets campaign ideas that way. It isn't pretty but if you have more time than money this may be worth a shot.
Email: Sign-up to your competitor's email list. You will get the promotions and offers that they are running sent right to your inbox for you.
