Whenever you’re delivering advertisements on Google, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Have you ever wondered what are your competitors’ strategies, and their creative approach to digital advertising? Or curious about what kind of marketing messages they’re using to attract new customers? In the process of developing your brand, it’s brutally essential to learn about your competitors and know what they’re doing to keep yourself competitive.
Learn these tools to crack the code of your competitors’ advertising strategy on major advertising platforms
In this article, we will look into the 4 major advertising platforms, which are Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And how to use the tool they provided to monitor your competitors’ move. If you try these out, it will be much easier for you to brand and market your business, taking into account what your competitors are doing.
1. How to check on your competition on Facebook: Facebook Ad Library
“I’m spending a couple of hundred dollars a day, but it seems like my ads are ineffective, and it’s not bringing me any revenue nor customers.” This situation is what a lot of small-sized companies and merchants are familiar with, and a lot of businesses would give up easily on delivering advertising in this early stage due to low ROI. In fact, when you start delivering ads, it usually won’t perform well until it collects enough data to optimize the target audience further, don’t think you’re wasting money, patience is the key in this stage. Once your ads accumulated enough data, it will be easier to optimize and see positive results.
For many years, Facebook has faced a lot of criticism for data breach and privacy violation. Many people have asked the platform to be more transparent with its users. Facebook knew it had to win back public trust, so last year, a development was made to aid this mission — the Facebook Ads Library.
The Ad library provides advertising transparency. When users saw a page or a post on Facebook, they will know exactly where it’s from. And it offers a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads that are currently running from across Facebook Products. Anyone can explore the library, with or without a Facebook account, to access all active ads.
Simply enter the name of your competitor, and you can check out all the ads it delivered on Facebook.
Facebook Ad Library — https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/
2. How to spy on your competition on Instagram: Info and Ads
If you have more followers on Instagram than you have on Facebook, spying your competitors on Instagram is pretty straightforward, simply follow these steps below:
Step 1: Go the account you’re interested in knowing more about and click on the dots (menu) on the right.
Step 2: Click on “About this account” to view its information.
Step 3: In “About this account” you can see general information about your competitors’ account, you can click on “active ads” to check out their active ads.
Step 4: Inside, you can further look into their ads on feed or on story.
3. How to spy on your competition on Google Ads: Neil Patel + Google Trend
Besides social media, Search Ads also plays an important part in the e-Commerce strategy. And when we think about search ads, Google AdWords is definitely the first thing that comes to mind for most people. When thinking of how to improve and optimize your own advertisement, it’s critical to know that your business doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Look into your competitors to see what they’re doing on the visual, title, ad description, discount, and target audience.
In the Internet era, you’re no longer just competing with a few other local or regional businesses, you have to watch out for global brands as well. In order to learn what factors made the success of their ads, here are two free tools that we recommend using, which are Neil Patel and Google Trend. These tools help you monitor your competitors’ SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and perform keyword research for you. They both give out keyword suggestions with search volume and more to give brands the opportunity to evaluate the past and present relevance in its search engine.
A. Neil Patel
To monitor your competition and get fresh perspectives on advertisement can be quickly done with Neil Patel’s marketing tool — Uberseggest. Just follow the steps below.
Step 1: Enter the website and enter the keywords that are related to your business and choose the country your company operates in.
Step 2: Enter your competitors’ domain and click “search”
Step 3: Check out what keywords they’re using and what are some other keyword suggestions.
B. Google Trend
Grasp the latest keywords trend through Google Trend. It’s handy for e-Commerce merchants to know the seasonal patterns of certain products and learn about your niche. Here are some features you can do with Google Trend to track behaviors and find insights for your brand.
- Explore: Find out how many people have searched for the term you entered in a certain period; you can also narrow the Google search trend by country and year.
- Compare: Compare several related terms at one time, you can then view how people in different areas interact with the word. And see how people have interacted with these searches over time. Comparing related terms is easy and a great way to confirm your current keywords or add new ones; this is a great way to really examine how keywords perform against each other.
- Trending Searches: Using this feature, you can find search queries that have seen significant jumps in popularity over the past 24 hours.
4. How to spy on your competition on Twitter: Ad Transparency Center
Just like Facebook, Twitter is on its way of trying to be more transparent, which allows anyone across the globe to search for any Twitter handle and bring up all the ad campaigns from that account that have run for the past seven days. Besides, for political advertisers in the U.S., there will be additional data, including information around billing, ad spend, impressions per tweet, and demographic targeting.
To check on your competitor on Twitter, simply follow these steps below:
Step 1: Open Twitter and look for “Ad Transparency Center” to search for advertisers.
Step 2: Scroll down to see advertisers’ promoted ads in the last 7 days.
5 angles to analyze your competitors’ Ads strategy to optimize your advertisement
Once we learned how to use these tools to look up what other advertisers or brands are doing, we can get references and ideas on how to optimize your own ads. To provide your customers with better content, web experience, and better service, we have listed 5 critical elements you can look into to understand your competitor’s advertising strategy.
A. Visual
Visuals are the most important element in an appealing ad, great and unique visuals can often make brands stand out immediately from the competition. Be mindful of your competitors’ visual and look closely if they’re performing A/B testing on ads. After a while of monitoring, check on what elements they remained and which they forfeit, this tells you what design components are essential in successful ads.
B. Title
The impression of an ad title is 5 times more than the ad’s copy. Evidence has shown that the ad title accounts for 80% of its success. Titles are usually only a few characters, and it should always be simple, direct, and actionable.
C. Ad Copy
While researching your competitors’ advertising strategy, create a list of questions such as, what’s the length of their ad copy? Is the tone formal or informal? Is the ad humorous or stern? These questions would help you understand the style of your competitors more. While titles are short and concise, your ad copy should be as informative as possible and include keywords. Besides, your ad copy must be able to solve your prospects’ problem once they finish reading it, be clear about what you’re offering.
Spying on your competitors can help you gain valuable insight into other areas in your sector, and a little competitive intelligence could give you the edge you’re looking for.
D. Promotion and Discount
If you’re running out of ideas on promotions and discounts, check out what your competitors are doing. Same, create a list of questions while reviewing their strategies such as, what discount their offering? Do they offer free shipping? And how do they incorporate the promotion and discount program into their advertising strategy? Give you discounts and promotions a proper reason, link them with seasonal sales, special events, brand anniversary, and more, so the sudden cut won’t seem suspicious.
E. Target Audience
Lastly, to convey your advertising messages effectively, you must understand the best way to reach your target market. By checking out who’s responding to your competitors’ ad, you can also get a better idea of what your audiences may look like, or discover other potential customers.
Marketing Associate at SHOPLINE. A digital marketing nerd and a podcast fan. You can find her out in the woods once in a while but most of the times she’s glued to her laptop screen indoors.