How to Research Your Competitor’s Ads on Facebook Ads
Advertising on Social Media can be quite competitive, especially if your competitor’s ads are creative, hence giving them an edge over your ads.
So in this article we will show you how you can check what your competitors are doing on Facebook ads. Doing this will give you ideas and reference on how to further improve your ads.
Research Competitors’ Facebook Ads
Running ads on Facebook should be a no-brainer since the platform itself gives you great exposure, which is also which is very important because organic reach for business pages is only around 5% on average.
That said, don’t go rushing and creating a new ad. You may want to consider checking what type of ads your competitor is running. Because of the privacy policy update, anyone with a Facebook account can see the ads associated with a Facebook page which is an advantage for businesses running ads.
Access the Facebook Ad Library
There are actually two ways on how you can check your competitor’s Facebook Ads. First is by checking the Ad Library in your browser. You can utilize this by searching on the location, ad category and the name of your competitor. This will give you information about the ads that are currently running on the Meta Products.
The second option is to check their Facebook Page and then find the Page Transparency section which is located in the left side panel of every page in desktop. Click See all.
A pop-up window will appear reflecting the Facebook page details including the ad library which is at the bottom portion. You may then click the “Go to Ads Library”
The Ad Library will tell you which ads they are currently running and when it started running. It will also tell you if they are running on Facebook, Instagram, or Both.
Competitor has a lot of Ads? Use Filters!
It can be overwhelming to check and sort through a lot of ads if your competitor happens to be running a lot of ads. This is where filters come handy. By filtering their ads, you can just sort the ads that you’re only interested in checking.
You can access the filter in the right hand corner for the Ad Library page
You can filter the following options:
- Language
- Platform
- Audience Network
- Messenger
- Media Type
- All media types
- Images – with little or no text
- Memes – images with text
- Images and memes
- Videos – ads that contains videos
- No image or video
Impressions by date – you can specify which date range and check which ads received the most impressions. If you’re not familiar with what ‘Impressions’ are, it is the number of times your ads appear on a user’s screen. Knowing that will give you an idea which ads your competitor’s running is effective.
Check Data on Facebook Ads That Appear in Your Feed
If in case you have spotted your competitor’s ad in your Facebook feed, don’t ignore it or skip it, instead you can actually see the ad’s insights by clicking the three dots in the sponsored ads in the top right corner. Select the Why Am I Seeing This Ad?
After clicking this option, Facebook will tell you the reasons why it’s showing you the ad by sharing the location and age the ad is targeting. This will give insights to what your target audience may be looking at in terms of your competitor’s ads.
The Stuff You Have To Pay Attention To on Your Competitor’s FB Ads
Knowing all of your competitor’s ads is one thing, but what to look for is another thing. Here are few things you should take note of:
- Which ads are getting the most impressions? To see which ads are performing the best and which ads are getting more eyeballs from your competitors, you should filter the ads by impressions.
- What are the commonly used media type? Checking this will also give you an idea what media type are commonly used by your competitor’s audience. If your competitors are using videos on their ads, then you know you will have to create one for your own brand.
- How do they layout the messaging on the ads? Review your competitor’s ad messaging. Are they making their ad copies short and sweet? Or do they prefer long-form ad copies like almost a mini-landing page? Do they rely heavily on emojis?
- How long are the ads running? Know that like other businesses, your competitors won’t let their marketing budget go to waste by running non-performing Facebook ads. So if you see that they have ads that are running for more than 90 days then that’s a good indicator that it’s a high-performing ad. You can use that ad as a reference to create your own high performing ads.