Finding your competitors’ ads on Google or Bing is fairly straightforward and often only requires you typing in keywords you want to rank for yourself. Finding your competitors’ Facebook ads is a little more difficult as you’ll have to manually manipulate your Facebook newsfeed, fall into their custom audiences and targeting parameters.
If you rely heavily on Facebook as a way to grow your business, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your competitors and how they do their marketing. In today’s article, I’ll reveal how you can spy on all their organic and paid Facebook posts.
Fall into their traps
To ensure you see all your competitors’ ads, you must fall into their custom audiences and targeting options.
Start by visiting your competitors’ websites and click on a number of different pages. If they offer a number of different products or services, use multiple accounts and only view certain page categories to see how advanced their retargeting funnel is. For example, look to see if they have specific retargeting campaigns for each product or whether they group everyone together.
If they have a newsletter, signup and see if they use customer lists as a way to retarget prospects on Facebook.
Tip: be sure to set your account (age, gender, interests) to fit their customer profile. If they serve ads targeting new prospects, this way you will have a greater probability of being served their ads.
Overriding the Facebook algorithm
When using your personal Facebook account to monitor competitor activity, depending on your past interactions you may not see all of their content unless you directly visit their page.
To ensure you see every organic post, you’ll have to manually prioritize whose content you wish to see instead of letting the Facebook algorithm control it for you. To do this, head to the Facebook menu bar, click on the down facing arrow and click News Feed Preferences:
You’ll be welcomed with a pretty screen asking what you’d like to customise, click Prioritise who to see first:
A feed will appear of all your friends and Pages liked. Just click on your competitors’ profile picture and all their organic content will be prioritized in your newsfeed.
Note: While this ensures you get to see all their organic Facebook posts, this doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be served all their ads. As mentioned earlier, you need to fall into their custom audience and set your profile information to fit in with their targeting options.
What you should be looking for
Okay, so you’ve found your competitors’ ads, now what? There’s certain things you want to look for, they are:
Message type – Do all their ads contain a particular message? For example, are they using emotions such as a fear, positivity, happiness, desire or exclusivity to get their message across?
If their ads have a clear message with an instinctive call-to-action, take that as a sign that they are at least aware about online marketing and the fundamentals. If their ads don’t contain a call-to-action button, use generic images or are incorrectly formatted, they are most likely running ads on the fly and little idea on what they are doing.
Engagement – As a Facebook user you’ll only be able to see the total amount of likes, shares and comments left by users. Retargeting ads generally receive less engagement as they are served to a much smaller audience, don’t necessarily think that just because an advert received a few likes mean it’s not working.
Locate posts that receive the most engagement and figure out why. Was it the message, the image or was their offer awesome? Learn from their wins and how you can integrate their strategy into your own Facebook marketing plan.
Device type – Certain Facebook objectives such as lead ads are only served on mobile devices, meaning if you only spy on your competitors using a laptop you may miss out on some of their ads.
Be sure to login to Facebook on a laptop, mobile and tablet device to see if they show different ads and whether messages have changed depending on device. For example, certain industries find it hard to convert mobile users and tend to use mobile ads as a way to brand and raise awareness, while desktop ads are more sales based.
If you notice several of your competitors only serving product ads on desktops, this may be a sign that your prospects don’t convert so well on mobile devices.
Why you should spy on your competitors
Facebook marketing is a complex beast, depending on the size of your business you can end up spending thousands of dollars per year testing different messages and ad types trying to figure out what works.
There is a way around that if you keep a close eye on your rivals. You’ll save both time and money by constantly monitoring your competitors to see what they are doing right and wrong.
Nick Bridges
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1 Comment
Amir shah
March 6, 2016thanks for this nice info now i see my favorite post on Facebook first