Facebook Ad Library is a searchable collection of all ads currently running from across Facebook Products, including Instagram. Anyone can explore the Library, with or without a Facebook or Instagram account.
I am grateful for all the pressure that has been put on Facebook lately around its data handling and advertising practices. What has resulted from this, is Facebook Ad Library that offers unparalleled transparency into what is running on the platform for FREE, unlike any other platform.
This information can be used in a lot of ways to help your digital marketing efforts. Below are some of the ways in which it can be used:
- Creative Inspiration
You can use Facebook Ad Library to browse all ads from the most savvy social marketers for creative inspiration from around the world.
Below is an example of all the ads from Nike from last 7 days that were shown in United States across all their platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network)
- Crafting a message better than your competition
You can use Facebook Ad Library to look analyze the ad types and the messaging being used by your competition to create a better message.
- Analyzing competition’s strategy
Facebook Ad Library lets you see ads by filtering time range to understand the evolution of your competition’s content, messaging and ad strategies. This can be really helpful to craft a content, messaging and ad format strategy that is better than competition.
I am really intrigued by political ads at the moment, so cant think of a better example to showcase how to analyze competition’s strategy:
Bernie Sanders is all about fundraising on Dec 12, 2019
Michael Bloomberg is about his vision. He doesn’t need any ads for fundraising because he doesn’t plan to. He is thinking of using his own money (billionaire)
- Analyzing competitors targeting strategy
Facebook Ad Library lets you see targeting as well as impression delivery details of each ad. It will help you understand the specific geographies as well as age groups and gender that your competition is trying to speak to.
I picked up two ads – one from Bernie Sanders and the other Mike Bloomberg to show the differences in their targeting criteria and their potential strategies to influence people.
- Michael Bloomberg’s ad on climate change was targeted at California and 78% of the impressions were shown to people in between ages 18-44.
- Bernie Sanders called out Michael Bloomberg’s billionaire status to ask for donations to support his candidature. All these ads went live on Dec 12th, 2019. The ads were being shown across all of US with higher # of impression on men vs women.
Facebook Ad Library is fairly new and a lot of automation tools have already come up to enable scraping of these ads to keep a check on competitive activity. You might also be interested in reading about how to use Facebook Ad Library to also see examples of advertiser spend strategy. While this data is only available for social causes and political candidates, it does give you a lot of interesting insights into the different ways in which they spend money and achieve results.
https://phantombuster.com/phantombuster/27108/facebook-ads-library-scraper
