How to see competitors' Facebook ads

Competitor research gives you ideas to test in your own Facebook ad campaigns. Record the creative format, hook, offer, call to action and when each ad started running.

Here, I'll show you how to find your competitors' ads and what you can learn from the creative. Their sales and conversion results aren't visible in the library.

Build a list of competitors

For instance, if you're running an ecommerce store, use Shopify to research who your competitors are. You can also use Instagram and Twitter.

Head over to the Meta Ad Library and suss them out.

Select a country and All ads, then search for each competitor's official Page. Check the Page name and website if several brands have similar names. You can filter by platform, media type or active status.

Build a swipefile of their ads

A swipefile is a collection of effective ads. Look at their ads, when they started running, which platforms are they on, etc.

This gives you a good idea of what they are running. A long-running ad is worth inspecting, but it doesn't prove the ad is profitable. Meta's Ad Library documentation lists the fields available for ordinary commercial ads.

Also look at the creatives and see what kind of ads are they doing. Is is branded ads only? Are they engaging UGC creators? Usually if a brand finds a specific style of ad working, they will double down on it.

Save their ads

You can save Facebook ads by right clicking on the ad and saving the image or the video.

If it's a video, try your browser's Save Video As option and check the file after downloading. Renaming a file to .mp4 won't convert it into a playable video. The download guide covers both manual and Swipekit methods.

But wait. Why not save the facebook ad link?

An ordinary commercial ad may stop appearing in the library after its campaign ends. Save the source link or Library ID for reference, along with the creative, copy and your notes.

Organize your ads

I use iCloud for this but you can use Dropbox, Google Drive or whatever floats your boat.

How you do this is totally up to you, but this is how I do it.

• Create a folder called clients

• Make a folder inside it and call it your client name

• Now chuck all your saved ads in there.

Over time your swipefile(collection) of ads will grow bigger but it will be manageable and you won't get it messed up between clients.

Bonus

What to do after collecting competitor Ads? Plug them into confect.io's system for a detailed analysis.

With this tool, you can get a detailed analysis of the Ad creative and what can you competitor improve upton(that you can get a headstart on!)

Conclusion

Hope that helps you with doing competitor research. The key takeaway here is to build a swipefile of effective ads.

Over time, you can simply reference your swipefile for research, for newer clients.

Last bit - we made a tool to exclusively help with building a swipefile of Facebook ads. We store all sorts of metadata that simply won't be possible by manually saving ads.

Plus we also made it super convenient to save ads.