How to research your competitor’s ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram?

17 September 2022

One of the greatest things about Facebook ads manager is that you can create, manage and control advertisements for Facebook and also Instagram! If you’re looking at an effective way to help boost your overall engagement, it will be worth looking into the process of creating ads. With millions of active users on these platforms, social media advertising is something that you should be investing in with your business. Using Facebook ad manager you can control the amount you want to spend which means you don’t have to spend the most to get the desired results you’re after!

Before you start your ad campaign strategy, it would be worth conducting some in-depth competitor research to ensure see what is working well for businesses that are similar to yours. This way you can avoid doing the things that don’t quite work so that you can save time and do the things that do work! By doing this you can also make sure that you are targeting the right audience to ensure the maximum success of your ad campaign.

The most popular tool to find your competitor’s ads is Facebook’s Ad Library which offers a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads currently running across Meta technologies. With this helpful tool, you can see what other advertisers are up to and glean insights to apply to your own ads.

What can I learn from using this tool?

What platforms other businesses are using to advertise – By using Ad Library you will be able to see the different social media platforms that businesses use to promote their services/products. Are they mostly focusing on Facebook or Instagram? If a certain platform is working for them, it may be useful to implement this strategy for yourself on the same platform.

See what CTA’s your business is using – Other businesses may be using CTA’s which generate views to the website or to even get the viewer to contact them. By seeing what works for a successful business, you’ll be able to use the same CTA to get the desired result!

How your competitors are driving traffic – With this tool you can view the operations of your competitor’s business pages and see where they are driving their traffic from. You can get more insight into what they’re offering and how they’re building sales funnels.

See what content your competitors are trying to push – Maybe your competitors are aiming to push a discount or may be trying to increase their email subscriber list. Whatever their plans are, you’ll be able to see this for yourself and keep it in mind for when you’d like to push a sale or discount.

What type of content your competitor prefers to use – You’ll be able to see if your competitor favors reels, static posts, or any other style of content for helping to promote a certain thing. Using these insights, you can get ideas for testing or optimizing different creative types. This may help you with inspiration, so get creative!

Another way to find out some insights about your competitor’s ads is by going on your newsfeed and scrolling until you find an ad from your competitor. Click on the “More Options” icon (the three dots at the top right corner) then, click “Why am I seeing this ad?” and you’ll discover the demographics the ad creator chose to target. This information is useful when you want to know more about the audience your competitor is targeting with Facebook ads.

We hope this post has provided you with some tips on how to get started with researching your competitor’s ads on Facebook and Instagram. If you have any further questions or if you would like us to go into more depth about any of the above, we’d be happy to help! Drop us a line!

How do you usually research how your competitors are doing when it comes to ads? Let us know in the comments!