When you start out with performance marketing, you know that the first ad you start running will likely not be the last. Testing is super important, so you will run many different types and variations. But having an idea of what works will save you a lot of testing budget. Today we’ll see how you can spy on your competition.
Before you draft an ad, you really should be thinking about how it will be perceived by your target audience.
The problem: it’s incredibly difficult to know what exactly works best.
That’s the very reason why testing is considered imperative for a good performance marketing campaign.
Instead of coming up with ideas from scratch, there is a website where you can see what other companies are doing (and it’s not scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed hoping an ad shows up).
The Facebook Ads Library
Whether you like the way your competition are advertising themselves or not, there are valuable insights to be gained from understanding how your competition are positioning and targeting their products/services.
Enter the name of the company you want to spy on, and you can immediately see all the ads that company has currently running.
Sadly you can’t see performance or past ads, but it’s already a great help to see what messages and what creatives they are testing.
Pro Tip: if the Ads Library does not recognize the name of the company, you can navigate to the company profile page via your normal Facebook.
Copy the link in your URL bar, e.g.
https://www.facebook.com/ChevroletEurope
Now open an incognito window, paste in the URL and navigate to the page (without logging in). Hover over the profile image of the company page, and copy the link. It should look like this:
https://www.facebook.com/274226426275469/photos/274226999608745/
The first set of numbers is the company page ID. That’s the one you want. Copy it, and place it at the end of the following link:
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=ALL&view_all_page_id=[PAGE ID NUMBER HERE]&search_type=page&media_type=all
Now use that link, and you will see the ads of that company page as well. Chevrolet Europe does not have active ads at the time of this post, Chevrolet does however.
One of the best features of Ad Library is the ability to filter ads by impressions by time. Facebook defines an impression as the number of times an ad is on screen for the first time. If you’re competing against big-name competitors, chances are they are running a lot of different ads. Using this function you can determine which ads were turned off over time because they did not perform well.
If you see ads that are still active but launched more than 30 days ago, it’s probably a pretty good indication that those ads have been performing well for your competitors.
To get a better picture of how long ads have been running, switch from filtering by impressions to filtering by time. You can filter to only see ads launched within the last day, the last 7 days, the last 30 days, or the last 90 days.
