Facebook is one of the most used social media platforms with approx. 2.2 billion daily active users. Companies use it to advertise their products demographically and reach a larger audience.
Most businesses today benefit from Facebook Ads and chances are that your competitors might be using it too. You would not want to miss out on insights provided by Facebook Ads and its spy tools. Now spying is usually wrong but when it comes to tackling competition, it is quite beneficial. Also, the Facebook Spying Tools are available for free. In this guide, we will help you understand all about these tools and how to use them.
Introduction to Facebook ads
Facebook has about 2.8 billion user accounts out of which 2.2 billion are active daily. in, this makes it the most used social media platform which has the potential to reach about 37% of the world’s population. Facebook ads being part of the Facebook family has access to all those users. This results in theoretically unlimited options to target the key audience.
Facebook ads provide many tools that help in reaching prospective customers. This allows businesses to understand the target marketplace and then plan the marketing strategies efficiently. Brand recognition is also positively affected by using Facebook ads. This is further enhanced by Search Engine Marketing.
Benefits of Facebook Ads Spying
Spying on the Ads of competitors provides various insights and allows to formulate a successful marketing strategy. A few main pointers for the information you can gain from Facebook ads spying.
- Getting Niche ideas: by looking at the ads you can observe ideas that are working and may even open up newer opportunities.
- Clear Examples: looking at ads will provide a baseline. This can be used as an example to start the planning.
- Competitor writing: By looking at ads you can determine how a competitor is approaching the product and the market in terms of content framing.
How to use the Facebook Ads Spy tool
In 2018, Facebook launched its free tool, Facebook Ad Library, which can be used as a Facebook Ads Spy tool in a legal way. This tool was released to provide transparency. Let us look at the steps to use the Facebook Ads Spy tool.
General steps to be followed
- Go to the Facebook homepage.
- In the search bar, input the page which you want to spy on.
- Click on the INFO AND ADS option in the navigation panel present on the left. You would need to scroll down to find the option since there are many other options as well.
- Click on INFO AND ADS to open the link
- Select the geographic location and all the other options from the drop-down menu.
- All the current ads for the matched parameters will be shown.
Let us understand the steps in detail
1. Setup Your Browser and alter the search settings
Note: If you are using an ad blocker, disable it for the further steps to work in the Facebook Ads Spy tool. You can also perform the steps in an incognito mode, which will allow the search results to be visible.
- Make the search parameters as broad as possible. For example, you can set the fields like COUNTRY=ALL or AD TYPE = ALL ADS in the Facebook Ads Spy tool.
- This will allow for a broader visualization of competitors marketing efforts.
- It also allows making proper visualization of all the metrics that provide an accurate impression.
2. Find the required pages on Facebook
- You can directly use the search bar to find the pages of the competitors on the Facebook Ads Spy tool. But sometimes search bar doesn’t show the desired results.
- In that case, go to the PAGE TRANSPARENCY section. Click on SEE ALL and then GO TO AD LIBRARY. This will show the brand’s library.
3. Begin your Research
- After the library is found on the Facebook Ads Spy tool start looking at all the ads of the competitor.
- The library shows everything from posts, music, video platforms, and many more.
- You can share the link of something you liked but beware of the fact that the link will expire in 24 hours.
Limitations of Facebook Ads Spy tool
The Facebook Ads spy tool or the Ads library comes forward as a boon to the marketing community. But, its main limitation is the restriction to save the ads. Also, the shared link tends to expire in 24hours. This limits the possibility to extract most from the content and is sometimes very difficult to maintain for future reference.
Conclusion
Spying is considered unethical, but healthy spying is good as well as beneficial. It provides insights that you never knew existed. Facebook ads being a very popular platform that houses many of your competitors, spying on their ads provides new perspectives on the product. Using the Facebook ads spy tool, looking at other ads becomes simple. This allows us to plan a proper strategy and understand the target market. This article also gave a step-by-step guide on using the Facebook ads spy tool.
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