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Chelsey Wyatt , Senior Digital Strategist
Chelsey Wyatt is a PNW native who has spent over three years specializing in Paid Social Ad Strategy for both large enterprise or start-up level companies. She functions as a strategic partner who loves combining humor and positive thinking and brings the brightest attitude to even the toughest client calls. There's no challenge she won't meet head on.
On days off you can find her wine-tasting with friends, walking her dog around town, spending time with family, reading, or playing video games to unwind.
October 24, 2024 | Gain Knowledge
Want to steal your competitors’ best social media ads? Social media competitor analysis hands you their exact playbook – from headline hooks that grab attention to offers that make customers whip out their credit cards.
Stop guessing what works. Start copying what’s already winning!
Your competitors spend millions testing what works. I’ll show you how to legally swipe their winning ads in the next 10 minutes.
No more burning cash on failed experiments. No more guessing what your market wants.
Look – most businesses waste time studying the wrong competitors or get lost in useless data. But I’ve helped 100+ brands steal their competitors’ best ads.
I’ll hand you my exact system to:
Ready to empower your brand, business, and ad performance? Keep reading.
Are you ready to see just how easy it is to identify your competitors and spy on their social ads? It only takes a few minutes to find relevant competitor ads across popular social media platforms.
I’ll even give you additional tips to make your social media competitor analysis even more effective.
This may seem obvious – but you can’t run a competitor analysis or spy on their ads without knowing who your competitors are! You probably have an idea of other businesses in your niche, but here’s how to produce even more refined results.
Start by thinking about the most essential industry keywords for your brand and target audience. Narrow it down to 5 to 10 for more distinct results.
Next, conduct a Google search to find a good selection of potential competitors in your industry.
This step is also important for an overall content audit, so while reviewing the results, be sure to ask questions like: Where does your business sit in the ranking compared to your competitors?
Do they utilize paid Google ads as part of their marketing efforts? What keywords do they use in their titles, and do they display as strong CTAs (call-to-actions)?
For social media specifically, dive into relevant hashtags and keywords. On platforms like Instagram, exploring the ‘For You’ section will provide a great overview of both competitor and user-made content.
Leveraging platforms like Ahrefs and Semrush is a great way to identify your competitors (and a great start to a site-wide content audit too). These platforms are handy for improving SEO, conducting internal site audits, tracking rankings, and understanding the competition. By plugging in relevant keywords or your site’s URL, you can find the most pertinent competitors.
If you’re looking for something free, we recommend Google Trends. This platform is simple to use and allows you to check on search volume, related queries, demographics, and more.
Most social media platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn – feature an ad library that keeps a record of ads unique to the platform. These resources provide businesses with valuable advertising insights.
By spying on your competitors’ social media ads, you can deduce what strategies are working to their advantage . . . and where they may be falling short. This enables you to spot opportunities and optimize your own campaigns.
The best part? All of these resources are free to use!
Meta’s Facebook Ad Library is a powerful resource for conducting competitor analyses, considering it hosts multiple platforms.
To run a successful Facebook ad search, select your target country, ad type, and keyword or advertiser name. You can choose from a few ad types, but for most businesses, choosing ‘All Ads’ will be the most beneficial.
After your initial search, head to the Filter menu to further refine the results. You’ll find a few more parameters to choose from. We suggest utilizing the language feature to speed up the auditing process if you are looking for international ad strategies.
Now, you have a carefully curated list of competitor ads to make social media content analysis easier than ever. Even more convenient is the ability to save your search for later use!
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Since Meta’s library includes Instagram, you don’t need to navigate elsewhere after spying on your competitors’ Facebook ads.
This time, once you run a search, click on that Filter menu, followed by Platform, to isolate Instagram specifically.
TikTok’s Commercial Content Library (CCL) is a simple tool for tracking competitor ads, with fewer bells and whistles compared to other platforms. The CCL allows you to specify the country, the ad published date, and the keyword or advertiser you’re looking for.
You can also check out the Top Ads Spotlight. This feature doesn’t include in-depth search options, but you can filter results by industry for more general snooping.
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LinkedIn’s Ad Library is a great resource if your ads target businesses, job seekers, and working professionals.
LinkedIn’s search function allows you to isolate specific companies, keywords, countries, and date ranges. Note that you can leave either the company or keyword field blank – you don’t need both.
Utilizing just the keyword field will help you find additional posts and competitors that may warrant a closer look.
Do note that due to the platform’s niche, LinkedIn’s Ad Library may not give you a complete overview of your competitors’ social media ads. So if you don’t find any on LinkedIn, be sure to check out all of the other relevant platforms.
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Now that we’ve successfully spied on your competitors, here are some more ways to enhance your ad library searches and overall social media advertising strategy.
Brand messaging is crucial – even on imagery-focused social media platforms. Not everyone has time to watch a full video or scroll through an entire carousel for you to gain that conversion. So be sure to consider the types of CTAs do your competitors use in their ads.
Is this actionable messaging delivered as on-screen text, voiceovers, captions, or all of the above? By figuring out where their CTAs direct users – whether it’s a landing page, product page, or lead form – these insights can inform best practices for your own ads.
When conducting an analysis, pay attention to the types of engagements your competitors’ ads see – whether that’s comments, likes, or shares.
Sometimes, you may find that their comment section isn’t even turned on, which can be a strategic move or an indicator of something misleading.
By comparing engagement types, you can determine how effective their audience engagement is, and how you can possibly do it better.
How do your competitors create space for conversions through their ads? Are they using native lead forms on the ad platform, or are they sending users to the site for their conversion event?
Native Lead gen forms on LinkedIn are four times more effective than website conversion campaigns and bring a significant lead increase with them.
However, platforms like Meta may result in less quality traffic through native lead forms. Instead, consider alternative methods such as in-app shopping or links that bring the user directly to the product featured in your ad.
When you analyze your competitors’ ad campaigns, pay close attention to the landing page URLs or custom UTMs. UTMs can contain up to five parameters – campaign, source, medium, content, and term.
This configuration can help a brand pinpoint and track its campaigns. It also reveals a lot about their current strategy, the audience they serve, and the objectives they are pursuing. And possibly help you devise your own UTMs and CTA messaging.
All major ad libraries include transparency centers that show the locations of active ads, either on the page before you enter an ads library, or on the ads themselves. So be sure to deduce if your competition is running ads in regions you are not.
It’s also important to look for regional language and dialect differences.
For example, if you are in the mineral sunscreen industry and notice your competitors advertising in objectively sunnier locations, that’s probably a good strategy to consider.
Spy smarter. Outsmart your competition with our Competitor Analysis.
Analyze Your Competitors
After you’ve evaluated the competition in your niche and successfully conducted a paid social advertising analysis, it’s time to use those findings in an actionable social media strategy.
This involves building your own paid strategy – ideally with the guidance of a trusted digital marketing agency partner. With a thorough internal audit, a well-defined plan of action, and a wealth of competitor knowledge, you’ve already set yourself up for success.
At Gravitate, we partner with countless businesses across multiple industries to bring them a personalized revenue-driving, lead-generation engine with valuable market insights.
Whether you are a large B2B tech company, a small B2C business, or something in between, we create comprehensive social media strategies that work for your unique business model.
Partner with us and see the difference Gravitate can make for your paid social media ads.
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