The Facebook Ad Library (now officially known as the Meta Ad Library) is one of the most powerful tools at an advertiser’s disposal. This comprehensive hub contains a treasure trove of information about ads running across Facebook and Instagram, giving you actionable insights into ad strategies, creatives, and performance.
Using this deceptively simple tool to analyze your competition and industry leaders, you can harness trends, pinpoint best practices, and empower your ads. Whether you’ve been running ads for years or just started your first campaign, now is the perfect time to master this flexible, powerful library.
Fortunately, learning to use Facebook Ad Library to gain a competitive edge is simple if you follow our step-by-step instructions. First, let’s consider what you’ll gain by adding this resource to your toolkit.
Benefits of Using the Facebook Ad Library
The Ad Library is designed for transparency, and was built by Meta to foster trust with their users (and non-users). But it’s also incredibly useful for a variety of other activities.
With the Facebook Ad Library, you can:
- Gather insights into competitors’ or industry leaders’ ads: Understand what works for others in your market to differentiate your own ad campaigns.
- Identify trends and best practices: Keep tabs on the latest ad creative, messaging, and call-to-action trends. Incorporate these best practices into your campaigns.
- Optimize your ad performance: Compare your ads with competitors’ campaigns. Maximize your ROI and ROAS by finding opportunities within their strategy.
Accessing the Facebook Ad Library
Getting started with the Ad Library is easy and doesn’t require a Facebook account. To begin, visit the Facebook Ad Library and choose the geography (e.g., United States) and category (e.g., All Ads). There are also options for special categories like “Issues, Elections, or Politics.”
You can use two different strategies to get the most out of your searches. If you already know a competitor by name, you can search for a specific brand or company This will show you every ad running under that account. Alternatively, you can type in a keyword that aligns with the product or services you’re trying to market. Next, you’ll need to start gleaning some insights.
Analyzing Ads With Ad Library Step-by-Step
Once you’ve discovered a brand that shares similarities with your product or service, it’s time to dig deeper into their strategies. For this exercise, we’ll focus on analyzing one competing business, but you could perform the same steps if you started with a keyword instead.
To view a brand’s ads, you’ll need to search for their name. Mousing over the brand's name will reveal a new box in which you can select “View Ads.” Once you’ve done that, you can investigate this brand’s metrics.
- View the Brand’s Ads: When you reach a brand page, you'll see an associated cover image and some brief details about the business. Below the header section, you’ll see their most recent ads. Each ad will have a “Show Details” button that leads you to more specific information about each.
- Analyze Ad Creative: Pay careful attention to the images your competitor uses to see how they position their brand and the thought they put into creative testing. Be sure to note whether they use a variety of formats, stock or custom imagery, text over images, and multiple variants with the same messaging.
- Capture Copy Takeaways: Unpack your competitor’s copy to learn how they sell themselves. Take note if they write formally or conversationally, use short or long formats, include emojis, or target different regions and languages with custom copy.
- Track Special Offers & Sales: Run through the ad archive to see when and how often your competitor runs sales. Select specific dates using the Filters button to narrow your search to popular sale times and see which promotions were run.
- Consider Targeting: While you can’t see explicit details for ad targeting, you can make educated guesses based on the messaging.
- Map the Customer Journey: The final step is simply behaving like a real customer. Click through the ads you’re viewing to experience it like a Facebook user might, and use this information for your strategy.
Mastering the Facebook Ad Library
The Facebook Ad Library is an indispensable tool for advertisers on Meta platforms who want to stay one step ahead of the competition. By carefully examining the brands' ads in your market space, you can uncover opportunities to differentiate yourself and engage with customers.
However, even though getting started with the Facebook Ad Library is easy, garnering consistent insights can be a real challenge. Tackling the basics of Meta’s ad hub doesn’t always equal instant improvement. Even marketing “experts” will spend countless hours with the Ad Library or similar tools only to come up with their best guess as to what works.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be a solo project. If you’re finding it difficult to demystify the Facebook Ad Library alone, the Meta advertising pros at Social Ktchn are ready to help.
Our 15+ years of combined experience and proven excellence in driving millions through Facebook and Instagram ads make us uniquely qualified to help your business use the Ad Library for success. Let us guide you to better ad and sales performance today.