How about taking a peek at all your competitor’s active Facebook ads bundled in one place? Did you find it interesting? Or worrying, as your strategy will also be “exposed”? For your information, this is possible to do this since June 2018.
At that time, Facebook pages had a section called “Info and Ads,” accessible on both desktop and mobile. The move was more a response to the crisis caused by the Cambridge Analytica case, giving more transparency to political announcements, which were seen as decisive for the election of Donald Trump in the United States.
Facebook’s justification was that while the vast majority of companies use the platform honestly, “malicious people can abuse our products as well.” So it was kind of a cannon shot to hit a fly, but a fly that bothers Mark Zuckerberg a lot.
Showing that it was not a word-of-mouth action, in March 2019 Facebook took it a step further by creating the Ad Library.
The Facebook Ads Library is openly available to anyone, whether they have a social network account or not. It centralizes all advertisers and their pieces in one place. If curiosity is strong, just click this link and start searching.
In addition to the pieces, there is a lot of other information available. You can tell when the page was created, if it was already renamed, or merged with another. The user can also see which countries are the page managers.
The Facebook Ads Library lets you see active ads on Instagram. However, you can access this information directly from Instagram app.
Go to the profile you are interested in seeing ads on, click the more information part, and press “About this account” > “Active ads.” Once there, you will be able to view them separately in Feed and Stories.
Another nice feature of the Ad Library is reports. With this tool you can see the spending of pages linked to politics and other topics of public interest. For now, only data from the United States, India, Israel and European countries are available.
The fact is that ad serving is already a reality, so everyone can see what the competition is doing. You can even click on a sponsored link and take the same path the Lead will take when impacted by the sponsored content.
The strategy, however, is not that wide open. For example, you can’t see targets and when your ad will run. In the end, what is exposed are the copies and the types of content that are sponsored.
Well, now that all Facebook users can take a peek at your ads strategy, it’s worth giving a go before creating your own ads.