Ads Library, Facebook’s library of creatives, helps advertising professionals get inspired, get insights, or even borrow a ready-made idea. But here, you can not only spy on competitors’ ads, but also understand what attracts the audience, stand out from the crowd, avoid the mistakes of others, and do better. Let’s take a closer look at how to monitor other people’s creatives and connections using Facebook’s free spy service.
What is the Facebook Ads Library
The Facebook Ad Library is a repository of information about all advertising materials placed on the Meta platform over the past three years. In fact, it is a spy tool that provides the following features:
- Viewing other users’ advertising materials by selected topics and geo.
- Saving creatives for further analysis and creation of unique ads.
- Tracking the actions of competitors, including advertising campaigns of individual advertisers.
It’s worth noting that Facebook, unlike many other advertising platforms, only allows white ads, which means that the posted materials have been moderated. That is why Ads Library helps to identify which ads can successfully pass moderation even when working with gray verticals.
In addition, this tool can be useful for digital marketing professionals for other purposes, such as monitoring the actions of direct competitors on their brands.
Advantages and disadvantages of a free library of creatives
The benefits of Ads Library are tangible for both webmasters and marketers:
- Detailed cards for each ad, providing information on placements, texts, images, and duration of placement.
- Facebook’s algorithms often successfully recognize text even in images, making keyword searches easier than with spy services.
- The library provides information about competitors and search for ads, even pointing to the pages from which they were launched.
- The main advantage is that the Facebook Ad Library is free.
Nevertheless, it should be understood that Ads Library cannot completely replace specialized spam services, and this is due to several reasons:
- All advertising materials have a limited shelf life – no more than three years. However, this is rather a plus for arbitrators, as no one needs outdated approaches anyway.
- It is impossible to download advertising materials in high quality, only the usual right-click save is available.
- Viewing targeted geos requires some effort and skills.
How to find competitors’ creatives through the library by keywords
The basic search in Ads Library is performed using keywords. To get the most information from the library, you need to search for keys carefully.
Collection of keywords
The first step is to collect keywords related to the topic of the offer. This can be done with the help of specialized tools. Some advertisers can also provide lists of keywords they have used in their advertising campaigns. When choosing keywords, you should avoid overly broad queries to avoid confusion. You should also pay attention to the fact that some countries use several languages, so you should consider collecting keywords for them separately.
Search settings
In the library, you need to select:
- country;
- advertising category – “All ads”.
Enter keywords one by one – if you add them all at once, Facebook may get confused and not understand what you want it to do. Usually, it is enough to use several keywords to find examples of relevant ads.
Filter the ads you need
Ads Library offers a huge selection of ads. But you don’t need all of them, and it can be slow to load all the ads for the entire period. Filters are provided for easy searching:
- Ad language.
- Advertiser – you can choose a brand from the list that is already in the search results. By the way, Facebook also shows which fanpage launched the campaign.
- Platforms – you can choose one or more placements on the Meta platform.
- Ad status – active or not. Inactive ads, as you might guess, no longer work, but you can use them for analysis and examples.
- Time of placement – you can search for ads by a certain date or within a certain date range.
How to find competitors’ ads without keywords
Sometimes it may be impractical or impossible to search for ads in the Facebook library using keywords. In such cases, you can resort to methods of finding creatives without using keywords.
Through a competitor’s FanPage
With the help of Facebook’s advertising library, you can track and analyze competitors’ advertising creatives if you have information about their fanpage. The procedure is very simple:
- Enter the brand name or its fanpage in the Facebook search.
- Go to the fanpage, open the “Information” section and find the “Page Transparency” item.
- Click the View All button.
Next, scroll down and click on the link “Go to the ad library”.
After clicking on the link, a page opens with all the posted advertising creatives that were launched with this fanpage.
Through the card of the selected ad
Additionally, there is another easy way. You can view the creative directly in the ad library. There is a link to the fanpage in the ad card. You just need to click on “View ad” and all the ad creatives launched from this page will open.
Through the search bar for the selected geo
Facebook search does not accept empty queries – you need keywords. But if you need to find advertising creatives for specific geos without using keywords, a life hack can help.
To find all the ads for a particular country, you need to copy an invisible gap into the search bar. This is not an ordinary space, but a specific symbol that is placed between the quotation marks – “â €”. It will show you all the ads related to this particular geo.
How to view ads for a specific domain
On Facebook, you can also find ads that lead to a specific domain. Let’s say you want to find ads that link to Google websites. To do this, select the required country in the filters and enter sites.google.com in the search bar.
Conclusion
Thus, the Facebook Ad Library can be a good alternative to paid spam services if you use it skillfully. When analyzing the results, it is also important to take into account several points. For example, if copies of one creative are actively used in certain geos, it is likely that it is already on the way to burnout. The launch date is also important. If an ad has been running for several weeks and hasn’t been blocked, it has probably been successfully moderated and doesn’t violate the platform’s rules. At the same time, you should look for active ads that have been displayed for more than two days. Ineffective ads are quickly disabled because there is no point in running them for more than two days.
However, it is impossible to say for sure that a particular ad from the Facebook library will bring profit. Everything will be seen during the testing process – perhaps this approach will simply not work for the target audience.
