Teardown · B2B software
monday.com's advertising, taken apart
Roughly eight thousand live ads in the United States, and nearly two thirds of them are plain search text. That is the exact inverse of the DTC brand we read last, where text was eight percent – and the difference is not taste, it is where the demand sits.
- Checked
- 20 September 2026
- Live US ads
- ~8,000
- Of which text
- ~62%
- Source
- Google ATC
B2B lives in the search box
Put the two accounts next to each other and the shape of each category falls out.
| Format | monday.com | Gymshark |
|---|---|---|
| Text | ~5,000 (~62%) | ~400 (~8%) |
| Video | ~3,000 (~38%) | ~4,000 (~80%) |
| Image | not separately counted here | ~1,000 (~20%) |
| Total | ~8,000 | ~5,000 |
Source: Google Ads Transparency Center, US region, format filter applied per row, checked 20 September 2026. Google's own rounding, so rows do not sum exactly.
Nobody types a query that means "sell me a hoodie". Plenty of people type one that means "I need something to track this project". Demand for business software arrives as a written question with a problem inside it, and that is what a search account is for. Demand for apparel has to be created, which is what video is for.
The practical version for anyone budgeting: if your buyer can describe their problem in words before they know your name, your money belongs in search first. If they cannot, it does not, however much you would like it to.
One product, sold as four
monday.com is a single platform. Its search ads are not.
| Headline | Description | Who it is written for |
|---|---|---|
| AI Gantt Chart Generator | Describe your project and agents on monday | Someone looking for one feature, not a platform |
| #1 Project Management Software | Get clear visibility across every project and help your team stay aligned with monday.com. | Someone shopping the category by name |
| Get a Fully Customizable CRM | Get an Easy-to-use CRM that is Fast to Setup. Control your Sales cycle, Never Miss a Deal. | Someone who thinks they are buying a CRM |
| #1 Scheduler For Teams | This App has a Built-in Online Scheduler to Help you Plan and Organize your Week Ahead. | Someone who thinks they are buying a scheduler |
Source: Google Ads Transparency Center, advertiser monday.com LTD, verified. Checked 20 September 2026.
This is segmentation by the job the searcher is trying to do, rather than by the seller's own product names – and it is the single most copyable thing on this page. Someone searching for a Gantt chart generator does not want to read about a work operating system. They want a Gantt chart. Sell them that, and explain the platform after they are inside.
It costs nothing but thinking. You need the list of jobs your buyers actually search for, one ad group per job, and a landing page per job that answers the question in its first line. Most B2B accounts we inherit have one ad group called "brand", one called "generic", and a homepage.
02
Two claims of “#1”, and no source for either
Not an accusation. An observation about where the burden of proof gets quietly dropped.
Two of the four ads open with #1. Neither says who ranked them, against what field, on what measure, or when. The claim is made in the ad, and the ad is where it stops.
There may well be a source. Software review sites publish category leaders constantly and one of them may say exactly this. That is rather the point: a superlative with no denominator is unfalsifiable from where the reader stands, which makes it worth very little to the reader and quite a lot to the advertiser.
We wrote a whole page about the same move in our own industry – how to read an agency case study – and the test is identical here. Ask what the number was, over what period, measured how. If the answer is a logo on a landing page, it was marketing, not evidence.
What is not in any of it: a price
Across the four ads there is no price, no trial length, no plan name and no indication of what a team of ten would pay. That is the category norm and it is worth being clear-eyed about the trade.
Hiding the price keeps unqualified clicks out of the funnel and keeps the negotiation open, which matters when deal sizes vary by an order of magnitude. It also means every click arrives without the single piece of information most buyers are actually filtering on, and a share of them bounce the moment they find out. Which of those costs more is an empirical question, and almost nobody in B2B runs the test.
For contrast: the DTC brand we read puts “From $24” in the Meta headline, and the language app we read next leads its search ad with “$0 for 1 month”. Neither is braver than monday.com. They just have a price a stranger can understand in one second.
03
The same category, run two completely different ways
We took Notion apart earlier. Putting the two beside each other is more useful than either alone.
| monday.com | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Live US search text ads | ~5,000 | far fewer |
| Positioning in the ad | Four different products by job | One description doing two jobs at once |
| Superlatives | “#1” in half the observed ads | None |
| Offer or urgency | None | None |
| Price | Absent | Absent |
Source: Google Ads Transparency Center, US. monday.com checked 20 September 2026; the Notion figures are from our earlier teardown, linked below.
Neither approach is wrong. A platform that can honestly be four products should be sold as four products; a product with one clear shape should not be pulled apart to look bigger. What would be wrong is picking between them on taste rather than on what your buyers type.
The Notion teardown goes through the restrained version in detail, including the one description written to satisfy both the person who wants the tool and the person who has to approve it.
What we would ask if this were our account
- Does each of those four ads have its own landing page? If they all point at the homepage, the segmentation is decorative and the fix is a week of work.
- What does “#1” cite, and is the citation on the landing page? A claim the ad makes and the page does not support is a bounce waiting to happen.
- What happens to cost per qualified lead if the price goes in the ad? Not the click cost – the cost per lead the sales team will accept. That is a two-week test and it is the question the category refuses to answer.
- How much of the five thousand is brand defence? At this size a meaningful share usually is, and it is rarely separated in the reporting, which flatters everything else.
Questions people actually ask
- Where do these numbers come from?
- Google's Ads Transparency Center, US region, checked on 20 September 2026, advertiser verified as monday.com LTD. It is public and anyone can pull the same figures. The counts are Google's own rounding.
- Why is there no Meta section?
- Because we could not scope it honestly. Meta's Ad Library searches by keyword for anyone who is not the advertiser, and "monday" returns more than fifty thousand ads from unrelated businesses. Publishing a sample we cannot filter would be worse than leaving it out.
- Is five thousand search ads a lot?
- It is a lot of ad units, not a lot of ideas. Responsive search ads multiply: a handful of headlines and descriptions across many ad groups produces a large count quickly. The number tells you the account is broad and actively managed, not that someone wrote five thousand things.
- Should a smaller B2B company copy this structure?
- The segmentation, yes. The volume, no. Splitting your search account by the job the searcher is trying to do rather than by your own product names is free and works at any size. Running several hundred ad groups needs someone whose whole job it is.
- Do you know whether any of it works?
- No. Spend, pipeline and win rates are private, and a large ad count is evidence of budget rather than of skill. This reads decisions, not outcomes.
This, on your account, with the numbers attached
The free audit is this analysis run on your own advertising – except we can see spend, pipeline and the landing pages underneath, rather than inferring from what the libraries publish.