For most businesses, a good product or service idea is not enough for success, you also need to get the word out to potential customers, so your advertising needs to stand out from the crowd. It's important not to be left behind by your competitors, so it's worth keeping an eye on them, which admittedly isn't easy, as there are countless ads running in the online space. How about we show you some useful tools that will help you easily monitor your competitors' ads and get inspiration from the best in the business? It's possible, because there are tools that make it easy to see what and how your competitors are advertising on different platforms.
See your competitors' Facebook ads
You can do this easily once you're familiar with the Ad Library on Facebook. It's a tool that allows you to search through ads that are currently running not only on Facebook, but also on Facebook products (e.g. Messenger, Instagram, Audience Network, etc.). It doesn't matter if the ads you're viewing are ones you've seen before, because you can search for anything.
The good news is that the Ad Library is basically open to anyone, so you can do some research in it even if you don't have a Facebook account (there are always exceptions, of course, so you'll need to have an account to view adult content, for example). Ads will be in the Ad Library within 24 hours of first appearing, so if you're waiting to see your own new ads as a test, but don't find them straight away, it's worth waiting a while longer.
How Facebook Ads works
You can access the Ad Library here, and once you've selected the right country in the top right-hand corner, you can start searching. By clicking on the "All ads" button, you will also see that you can now enter the name of the advertiser - even your competitor's company name - in the search bar, so you can see their active ads currently running, as well as related media (photos, even videos) and text.
If you are interested in ads related to social issues, politics, elections, you can also view their active ads and - unlike commercial ads - their inactive ads. You can search for them by clicking on "issues, elections or politics".
You see not only the ad itself, but also some of its details. Once you've found the ad you're looking for, click on the button to view the details, where you can see, for example, when the ad was published, and the icons at the top of the ad show which platforms it's running on. In addition, you will also find the ID of the ad and the link itself, which you can copy and paste into your browser to see the ad directly.
You can also use filters to narrow down where or on what topics you want to advertise. You can use the following filters:
- Location: you can choose exactly which country in the world you want to see your competitor's ads.
- Platform: If you only want to browse ads on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram or Audience Network platforms, you can do that separately, but you can of course set it up to see ads from all platforms at once.
- Appearance: you can see which ads were active during a given period.
Don't forget Google ads!
Although we can give you a number of tips on how to make your Google Ads campaigns successful, you should also monitor the ads running on Google's network, because like Facebook ads, it's not recommended to lag behind your competitors. To keep an eye on your competition, we recommend the Moat tool. This alternative allows you to analyse your display ads, as it lists your competitors' current and past display ads. It is important to note, however, that it has some limitations, as it only works for larger brands, and you cannot yet find ads from smaller companies. Important information is that registration is also required.
However, you can easily search among the major brands using the search bar on the main page, which includes the phrase "search by brand". Type in the brand you're looking for, or even the brand's website, and you can see the display ads that are currently running and have run in the past. If you hover over them, you can see some details about the ad, such as when it ran, on what device and in what size.
Summary
Facebook Ads and Moat are also great tools to find out what your competitors are advertising, even during a current campaign period. It is by no means recommended that you copy their ads - they can be great for inspiration however. Importantly, it's not just your competitors' ads that you should look at, as you may well be able to adapt and apply best practices/patterns from other sectors for your own product/service advertising.
#promobox#But if you'd rather let professionals handle your ads, feel free to contact us!##
