How can I identify my competitor's most engaging ads in ad libraries?

In today's hyper competitive arena of Facebook Ads, the best way to win is to model your Ads after your competitor's high performing Ads.

But how to find their high performing Ads in the first place? 

Enter Facebook Ad library. This library house a plethora of ads, but spotting the real gems among them requires understanding certain heuristical data about ads.

In this article, I'm going to show you 5 no-bs ways to identify engaging ads.

4 Tips to help identify engaging ads

1) Look out for EU Ad transparency data. This data can show you ad spend of said Ads. Unfortunately it is only available for Ads running in the EU. But if you're looking for EU Ads(lucky you!), you can find the Ads where your competitor has spent most of their Ad budget. Good chance they are going all in on this Ad, or this Ad format.

To find additional info for EU Ads, click on the 'See ad details' button on the Ad card in the fb ad library.

Then expand the European Union transparency section. This will give you a lot of data, including where the Ad ran(location), targeting(Age, gender), and reach(EU ad delivery).

2) Check frequency of Ad formats. Go through your competitor's Ads in the Fb ad library. After some time you can see some trends emerging. For instance they will be going all in on static Ads, or video Ads. Or perhaps they are going full in on UGC content. Either way, you can find what works in their niche simply by observing how they run their Ads.

3) Analyze their visuals and copy. By analyzing their visuals, you can again view some common patterns like common words they use, what creators they use, certain nuance like asmr-like audio, close-up shots, etc.

Magic Spoon - these guys are going hard on video these days. No voice overs, only asmr-ish audio.

4) Check their Ad active status. I've kept the best for last! When analyzing your competitor's Ads in the Facebook Ad library, check how long their Ad has run for. You can also filter for inactive Ads. That way, you can find out how long their Ads ran for in the past. This will give you two bits of information.

• What is their iteration time? Some brands are ruthless and test Ads for 3-4 days. Or they are still in the early testing phase
• How long their winners last for. Some brands run with winners for longer durations. Other brands will figure out an Ad is high performing, make 2 variations and quickly start testing them.

At the end, Ads that run for longer are generally indicative of a high performing Ad.

Magic Spoon - these two Ads are doing really good. Their run time is 45 days(screenshot taken on 10th July)

Lastly, I'm going to plug Swipekit here. All these tactics will take you hours to compile. Plus the Ad data found on Facebook is temporarily, so you'll need to download and save this metadata/Ad assets somewhere.

With Swipekit, all you need to do is install our extension, create an account(no credit card needed) and save winners. They will be in your Swipekit library forever. Plus we give you details metadata about the Ad, including Ad active status, Ad assets(Video, image, carousel DCO, etc) and much much more.

Same two Ads saved with Swipekit. Note the metadata including Ad active days, Ad category, and even video transcript and landing page screenshot is available!

Conclusion

Navigating through the Facebook Ad library to identify high performing Ads is a great idea to understand your competitor's strategy. Hopefully, this guide gave you some good insight into what considerations do you need to take to understand and find winning Ads. If you want to take this further, I've also written an article for analyzing publicly available Ad metrics.

With tools like Swipekit, the process becomes less daunting and more insightful. This attempt not only provides a learning curve but shapes your Ad strategy and makes it easier to create engaging ads for your campaigns.