What metrics in ad libraries are most crucial for analyzing competitor ad performance?

Ad libraries give out much more information than what is shown on the surface. To effectively find winning Ads from your competitor's Ads, you need to find metrics that can help you find which Ads are the most effective.

List of important metrics

1) Impressions and reach. These metrics will you find out how much push your competitor is giving to certain ads. It can't help you find winning Ads - at least not directly. But it will help you gauge what type of Ads your competitor is banking on.

2) Ad variations. Go through your competitor's Ads and see what kind of Ads they are running. If you find many variations of similar Ads, you know they are optimizing their Ads and running tests underneath the hood.

3) Ad running duration. Inside the Facebook Ad library, you will be shown dates on when a said Ad started running. Subtract the days from the start till today(or if its inactive, till the date the Ad went down) and you will get the number of running days.

This is a great metrics to find winning Ads by their ad running duration - the logic being, most brands will let winning Ads run for longer since they will have high ROAS.

Note that traditional ads metrics such as CTR, conversion rate, customer retention rate, etc can give you much better insights into what makes an Ad tick. But unfortunately these metrics simply aren't available through Ad libraries.

What to do after finding these metrics

Once you have these metrics, you'll need to model your own Ads based on your competitor's winning Ads.

There's a bit more research involved here.

1) Understand their overarching brand strategy. Chances are, you won't be able to replicate their offer, so you need to understand what makes their entire brand strategy tick.

To do you, check their Ads landing pages. This will help you understand their offering.

2) Model their winning Ads to your specifications. Once you have a good idea of which winning Ads you want to model, save the winning Ad's video and metadata. This will be needed for the next step of creating your own Ads.

Disclaimer: Swipekit doesn't condone copying Ads. We recommend using existing Ads as inspiration for your own Ads.

3) Create your own Ads. Depending the Ad, if its a UGC-type Ad, you can send the ad video as a reference to a creator and give them an Ad brief. Create the brief based on the Ad video. You can use something like Riverside FM to get the video transcript, get ChatGPT to remix the transcript to your liking(based on your brand, offering, etc) and then finally throw the new script inside EleventLab's text-to-speech area, or send it to your creator.

Hopefully, this gives you an idea into what goes into analyzing competitor's Ad strategy.

Helpful plug - if you found these steps insanely complicated, use Swipekit to streamline your workflow. Swipekit helps you save Ads, along with their metadata such as Ad active days, Ad category, asset type and much more.

Beyond that, it will also generate video transcript of each Ad. It will also take a desktop and mobile screenshot of the landing page whenever you save an Ad.

Once you decide to create your own Ad, just copy the transcript generated by Swipekit, and throw it inside ChatGPT.