When running ads on Facebook and Instagram, understanding your competitor landscape is extremely helpful. This helps you learn more about how they’re approaching your shared target audience as well as gives you more context for your own work.
Learning more about others’ approaches can give you insight into where you have an edge, what messaging you might be missing, and just generally provide inspiration and opportunities to get a leg up.
Facebook page transparency
Image Source: socialmediaexaminer.com
In case you didn’t already know, you can find any active ad for any company on Facebook. This right here is our friend and the key to everything we’re discussing today.
To do so, first go to the company’s Facebook page. From there, you will:
- Scroll down until you see, on the left side panel, “page transparency” (sometimes just “page” with the “i” information graphic). If you scroll all the way down and don’t see it, that means it can be found in the navigation — go to the “about” section, and it should appear beneath their cover image.
- Once you click on that, you should see an option for “go to ad library.” Click it.
- This will take you to a new tab that shows you all active ads for the page and what platforms they’re running on — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc.
Image Source: socialmediaexaminer.com
When you do this, you won’t have access to their audience targeting, budget, results, or duration other than seeing when an ad launched. This means you can’t see how each of these page’s ads are performing, but that’s not really what you’re after here anyway. What you’re looking for is qualitative, not quantitative.
Let’s take a look at our first example, Coca-Cola:
Example #1: Coke
In this scenario, let’s say you have a beverage business that’s going into competition with Coca-Cola.
As you plan out your marketing strategy, a good place to start would be checking out their ads. (In this world let’s pretend you’re not so small to start that Coca-Cola’s international branding and century-long history is irrelevant. It’s all hypothetical, after all — but maybe an extra relevant company in this hypothetical scenario would be Jones Soda, who’s smaller and has a more manageable scale to learn from both in their own operations and their place in society.)
Anyways, if you’re on Coca-Cola’s US page, you’d scroll briefly past “about,” “photos,” and “videos,” and see “page transparency” on the left. Click on “see all” in the page transparency box, and it’ll open up a box where, if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see “go to ad library.” Clicking on that will take you here.
What you can see here is that, as of June 2023, it appears Coca-Cola is harnessing a campaign for “Coke Studio,” a rewards program partnering with a variety of summer music festivals.
Now, the scale of that is probably not attainable for your new company yet, but it still allows you to better understand their approach and learn from it. Does this leave any gaps that you could advertise towards? What about inspiring you to do your own partnerships with other groups? There are endless questions you could ask here, and equally endless takeaways you could apply to your own business.
Now for another hypothetical:
Example #2: Local Business
Here let’s say you have a local business such as a car dealership, ice cream parlor, or clothing boutique.
If your ice cream parlor is in Seattle, then that means one in, say, Michigan is not a direct competitor. However, you can still go through this same exercise on that far-away ice cream parlor’s page to see what ads they’re running and what you can learn from them.
When you’re on the Meta ads library, you can add general terms in their search bar — “ice cream parlor,” for instance — which will come up with potential competitor ads to draw inspiration from beyond just one company.
Image Source: socialmediaexaminer.com
Use this to find multiple different businesses relevant to your own, and from there you can go through many and get lots of inspiration and direction.
Now what?
After doing sufficient competitor research this way, you can develop a strategy of your own. Now you know what ads your competitors are running; what can you learn from what they’re doing well? On the flip side, what message can you send that will differentiate you from the rest? What are they neglecting that you can take advantage of?
For example:
Say your competitor emphasizes saving money with their product — what if your product is built better, saves time, and is more efficient, thereby saving more money in the long run?
Maybe your competitors all are using only static image ads — might you be able to distinguish yourself with carousel ads that are more informative and visually engaging?
Your competitors might only be running ads on Facebook — you can take hold of Instagram’s user base by running ads there where you have minimal competition to deal with.
The purpose of this process is to familiarize yourself with the competitive landscape you’re dealing with. It’s essentially just research that allows you to build a foundation for developing your own strategy.
From there, you’ll be able to run more effective ads from the start, as well as be better informed on how to improve them as you move forward.
