Find Competitor Facebook Ads and Adapt Their Strategies

Getting started or an experienced Facebook ad manager, knowing what campaigns your competitors are running is essential to cutting CPA costs on Facebook ads.

Below we will list a few different tools Facebook provides for analyzing competitors' Facebook ads. Then we will dive into some tips for analyzing the ads that are being successfully run by your competitors.

Analyzing Your Competitor's Facebook Ad Campaigns Can Cut Down Ad Cost

If you're like most small businesses, you're always looking for ways to cut costs and increase efficiency. Typically, owners think that by cutting costs they are becoming more efficient. This is not always the case as reduced spending drives less reach and impressions on Facebook. In the short term, you may see a bump in efficiency in your Marketing Efficiency Rating (MER) (Revenue / Spend = MER). However, over time you will see that bump in MER decrease as the return visitors from previous spending decrease.

By simply reducing spending we are not addressing the root of the problem which is optimizing ad performance. When looking for efficiency in your marketing budget taking the time to analyze your competitor's Facebook ads can tell you a lot about what works and what doesn't - and that knowledge can help you reduce your ad spend more effectively.

Of course, it's important to take a holistic view of your marketing strategy; simply copying your competitor's approach won't necessarily lead to success. But by understanding what they're doing right, you can incorporate and "adapt" some of those same elements into your own marketing mix. And by understanding what they're doing wrong, you can avoid making the same mistakes.

Analyzing your competitor's Facebook ad campaigns can be a valuable exercise that can help you improve your overall marketing strategy.

How To Use Facebook's Free Tools To Analyze Competitor's Facebook Ads

When analyzing competitors' ads there are several "Facebook ads spying tools" you can use that will make your job easier. I put "Facebook ads spying tools" in quotes because everything we will go through is provided by Facebook for free.

Typically Small Business Approach To Analyzing Competitor's Facebook Ads

In the past, I've seen clients screenshot and send me competitors' ads or video ad recordings when they stumble across them in their news feed.

These will generally get added to a folder of some sort or a slack channel.

If this is what you are doing. Great. You are ahead of most. The next step is to use some of Facebook's free tools to analyze your competitor's ads.

This step will allow us to see how long and how many ads are currently running. This gives us an idea of which ads are successful. Our competitors would not run ads for any length of time that were unsuccessful.

Using Facebook Ad Library To Discover Competitor Facebook Ads

The first step is to go to Facebook Ad Library. This is a tool provided by Facebook that shows all current active ads running on the platform.

You can also find the Facebook ad library by going to Facebook.com and using the search bar to find the business page of your direct competitor. In this example, I'm using Ted Baker one of my favorite shirt brands.

To get to the Facebook ad library this way, go to the competitor's Facebook page and select "Page Transparency". You can find this on the left of their newsfeed if you are on a desktop.

Select "See all", then, "Go to Ad Library"

Using Facebook's Ad Library To Analyze Successful Facebook Ads & Instagram Ads

Once you are on the competitor's Facebook ad library page, you will see all of the ads that they are currently running.

You can filter by language, advertiser, platform, media type, and active and inactive ads, as well as the date range.

As mentioned above you can also when these ads started running.

The Facebook ads library is a great tool to use to get an idea of what Facebook ads your competitors are running. Ads that are running longer than 1-2 weeks can be considered successful ads.

All of this information can help understand your competitor's ad strategy.

Final Notes On The Facebook Ad Library

You may notice two additional tabs in the upper right corner. Facebook Ad Library report and the Facebook Ad Library API. As a small business owner unless you are running political ads these two sections are not relevant to you.

This report is an effort to drive more transparency in the political ad arena. You can also see spending broken down by region and page.

The Facebook Ad Library API is for devs and allows you to perform more detailed political keyword searches.

How To Use Facebook To Do Market Research On Competitor's Target Audience

You can also see what kind of targeting your competitors are using for their campaigns.

There are two ways to do this. First, you can go to a few different competitors' pages then go back to Facebook and get retargeted. The other way is to find a new brand that is running ads directed toward you.

To view the targeting select the 3 dots in the upper right corner of the ad. Then select, "Why am I seeing this ad?"

That's it Facebook will give you some general info on competitors' ad campaigns.

What To Look For When Analyzing Competitor's Ads

Now that you have the right tools to analyze your competitor's Facebook ads lets dive into what you should be looking for.

Take Into Account Competitor's Facebook Advertising Time Frames

Looking to launch an ad campaign for a holiday. Using the various techniques we discussed you can find competitors' Facebook ads and see what type of ads they ran during that time frame.

For example, last year for Father's Day when did competitors start running ads for Father's Day. Should you also run during the same time frame?

If you a small business and running local Facebook ads and suddenly see a drop off in ad performance or an ad campaign that doesn't perform as well as it should. Did any competitors run Facebook Ads during that time frame? What were they promoting? How would this affect your Facebook ads?

Look Into Messaging Used For Competitor Ads

You now know when competitors ran their Facebook ads. What message did they use for Father's Day?

Did competitors start to mention Father's Day weeks in advance, then on the days before and on Father's Day switch to messaging plus mention of various discount codes.

If so should you adopt their strategy and messaging for your own Facebook ads.

Tip: We want to adapt competitor ads not steal or copy.

Saying we do the same thing cheaper, faster, and better than our competition is not a winning ad strategy. If you are in a highly saturated market then pointing out the benefit and feature that makes you different could be a winning ad.

Take Note Of Who The Customer Is

Who is your direct competitor targeting with their ads?

You know this because you use the Facebook Ad Library.

Your competition is targeting people in a certain age range, that are primarily male.

In the copy, video ad, or image do they call out a specific type of person.

For a bike company do they write their Facebook ads messaging for the adventurer or is their messaging focused on the everyday commuter?

You can use all of the above to tailor your own messaging. This can save time especially if your direct competitors have a larger budget, are running multiple ads, and have way more data than you.

Go Forth And Conqueror Your Next Facebook Ad Campaign

You know have everything you need to analyze your competitor's Facebook ads. If you still need help. Feel free to reach out to me and I'd love to dive into this more with you.

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