The competition in the marketing world has skyrocketed over the past few years and it’s safe to say, if you are not at the top of your game, you are losing profitable customers continuously.
At the core of any marketing strategy lies content and advertisements are the medium connecting your content with the customers. Hence, the better curated, profiled and thought-off your advertisements are, the better are your chances of landing valuable leads and potential customers.
Let’s face it, given the competition, coming up with unique ideas to create the most relevant advertisement is one hell of a task. Thankfully, there are tools you can rely on to find what’s working for successful brands in your niche and take the inspiration to create similar or better ads.
In this article we’ll discuss Facebook Ad Library, a library of ads from all the Meta Platforms which you can use to beat the competition.
Let’s get started…
What is the Facebook Ad Library?
Launched by Facebook (Meta), the Ad Library is a library of all the ads running on Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Just like you would pick a book you have an interest in, from a library and read it, get inspired and make notes, then apply the learnings.
You can pick from thousands of top-performing ads in your niche to find what is working and how to approach creating valuable ads which get leads and customers.
With the Facebook Ad Library, you get access to ads running around the world, research top competitors’ ads, get political ads transparency and more. This way you can create high-quality ads based on what’s already working for similar businesses as yours.
When to use the Facebook Ad Library?
Well, you can and should use the Facebook Ad Library from the get-go. Think about it. Creating a well-thought-off ad takes time. There are many moving elements like the decision to use an image, meme or video, attention-grabbing title, simple yet relevant body within a word-limit, the CTA and more. This takes an awful amount of time and you need to get all the elements on-the-point else you would lose your hard-earned money on running ads which won’t do you any good.
Perhaps you are just getting started and about to launch your first campaign or there are some unique ideas you wish to validate or simply you need some inspiration. This is where you can find, study and get ideas from successful active ads using the Facebook Ad Library, hence minimizing your chances of burning money on low-quality ads.
How to use the Facebook Ad Library to create winning ads?
Everybody has access to the Facebook Ad Library, but only those who know how to use it correctly create winning ads. So, what should you do? Well, Facebook provides many filters and features to help you research.
Let’s discuss how you can use each of them to squeeze maximum value.
Look at what’s working for your competitors
Understanding what’s working for your direct competitors helps you get started correctly, even makes an instant impact. You can use Facebook Ad Library to see all the active ads from your competitors. All you have to do is search for your competitor’s brand and you’ll get the results.
Say you find four running ads. Now, carefully analyze every section and make notes, or a screenshot for later use. Try to break down the tone they have used, the placement of the visuals, CTA, length and important points in the body. This can help you get an idea of what you should do. You can use this information to adjust your budget, edit your target audience, or play with the images/videos.
Understand the ads in your location
With the Facebook Ad Library, you can not only search for ads, but also use many of the built-in filters to narrow down the results. One such filter lets you search for ads in a specific country.
Unfortunately, you can’t use other regional filters. But there’s a workaround. Search for the name of the city from which you wish to find the ads. If someone has used that city’s name in their ad copy, you’ll see the ad.
This is great if you have local customers. Understanding what ads are driving results with a local targeting audience, you can create similar copies for your business.
Filter by media types
Ads are as good as the media used in them. If you want to get results, experiment with unique visuals like images, GIFs, memes, videos, etc. These visuals not only grab the attention of your audience quickly but also help make plain text content entertaining and appealing.
The Ad Library offers you the ability to filter the results with images, memes, videos or video transcripts.
Say, your brand sells Print On Demand merchandise and you need to run Facebook Ads to redirect customers to your website. Mockup images and videos are one of the core visual appeals of your products.
Now, with the media filter, you can look at what mockups successful brands in your industry are using. If you find many variations of an image or a particular video or meme. You can create similar visuals with your brand colors, tone, voice at the center.
Find the testing ads
Testing variations of a content helps you understand what your audience likes.
Say you are confused about posting a mockup of a model wearing your merch, or simply a high-quality image of the product. In this situation, you needn’t create different copies. You can create two ads with your images and monitor for a period. The ad which performs better passes the test. Now, you can rely on this specific image type for your future ads.
You can do this with variations of your copy, ad-format, CTA and more. The goal is to test your content and use what works.
Well, when you search for your competitors’ ads, you may find variations of a particular ad which they are testing. This way, you can create similar variations to test.
Filter out the competitive time frames
Say you want to run a non-holiday sale. Now, you don’t want to directly clash with a sale your competitor might run at the same time. With the Facebook Ad Library, you can filter ads by date. This way you can find out in which timeframe your competitors are running a sale, contest, giveaway, etc.
Suppose you ran a sale which didn’t get the desired reaction. You can check for similar sales from your competitors to improve your campaign.
Use the impressions by date filter
One of the most critical aspects of understanding the effectiveness of an ad is to check the number of impressions it has received.
So, what is an impression?
Well, each time a user views your ad, Facebook counts it as an impression. If an advertisement has lots of impressions, this means it has a large audience and a budget.
With the impressions by date filter, you can select a particular date, on or before, on or after a date, or a date range. For instance, with the filter from January 10th 2022 to 15th March 2022, you’ll see all the ads with the most impressions.
Go niche on the platforms and placements
Apart from the quality of the ads, their placements on the Facebook Platform play a critical role in getting impressions. You can pick from Facebook feed, stories, on the right column, in Messenger, and more.
Using the Facebook Ad Library, you can see the placements of the ads.
Look at all ads from the same advertiser
Say, you come across an amazing ad which you think will work great for your brand. Now, chances are other ads from the same page/advertiser might also interest you. In the Facebook Ad Library, the Page Transparency section gives you all the ads posted on a page. This can help you understand the trends in creating such ads and tell you what you must do to create similar ones for your brand.
Find out how much your competitors are spending
How much do you spend on your ads? This is one of the most asked questions. Well, if you are confused or just getting started, the Facebook Ad Library can help you. While this information isn’t available for all the ads, some show you a breakdown of what others have spent.
Don’t miss the Report Feature
The report feature of the Facebook Ad Library helps you filter ads which focus on geographical, social, elections or political issues. You can also narrow down your search further by filtering by advertiser, location and the spending amount. If your brand shares values around a social issue, this information can help you understand what similar brands are talking about.
Save the Ads
The Facebook Ad Library gives you a plethora of information to make informed choices and learn from ads running worldwide. But unfortunately, it also removes the disabled ads.
What if you find an amazing ad and want to revisit or share it with your team later but while searching it again you can’t find it because Facebook removed it.
Imagine saving ads directly from the Facebook Ad Library. This way, you can not only revisit them at your convenience, share with your team of creatives with a link, but also organize them into unique categories for quick references for various campaigns.
Now, the real question is: Can you do this from the Facebook Ad Library?
Well, you can’t. But there are a few tools in the market which help you save ads and much more.
Foreplay
Foreplay is a software offering which is equivalent to Facebook Ad Library on steroids. It gives a plethora of features to save ads listed on the Ad Library, organize them into folders, create AL briefs, share ad folders with a single link and more.
Discover winning ads
With Foreplay’s deep product search, you can find all competitors in your industry to understand their marketing efforts. But this gets more fun with the AI Search using which you can find ads containing specific visuals.
Not just the ad, but the landing page it takes the audience to, is equally critical. foreplay allows you to find the landing pages of ads you like. You can filter ads running on a particular platform or more than one at the same time. After you have applied the filters, you can sort the results by their running time to find the longest running ads.
Save ads with the foreplay Chrome Extension
Foreplay’s Chrome Extension lets you save ads directly from the Facebook Ad Library. This means even if an ad gets removed from the library, you’ll still have access to it. You can save all types of ads including Image, Video, Carousel and DCO.
Foreplay also lets you add custom tags to your save ads to reference them later and share with anyone using a link, even when they don’t have a foreplay account. Your colleagues can also share notes to comment on the shared ads.
Unleash the AI Briefs
Foreplay allows you to unleash the power of AI to create unique variations of a brief which you can use in split-testing. You can create brand profiles with custom fonts, colors and export the brief/storyboard to PDFs and sheets.
These are some prominent features of foreplay but there are many more which help you streamline the process of research, brainstorming quality ideas, and team collaboration to quickly iterate and grow with the competition and latest trends in your niche.
MagicBrief
MagicBrief is another superb alternative to the Facebook Ad Library which offers many useful features to help you stay at the top of your game. Whether you are part of a marketing team, a freelancer/creator or a DTC brand looking to create winning ads to drive results quickly, MagicBrief has the power to make this a reality.
Save ads with a click and rework
Using the MagicBrief’s chrome extension, you save ads with a click. This means having access to the saved ads even after they aren’t running. Now, break down the search with the power of AI to view details like the ad copy, CTA, landing page and much more. After you pick the best ads, create unique folders and add the ads to categorize them. Finally, share them with your team or clients with a link.
Enjoy the Storyboards
With MagicBrief’s storyboards, you can create winning ads quickly. Their drag-and-drop capability allows you to organize and reorder ads smoothly. You can add video contexts to your board, along with links and export it as a formatted script, Premiere Pro Timeline, MP4, captions or frames.
Analyze with MagicAI
If you have saved many video ads, the MagicAI offering from MagicBrief is a time-saver. It uses AI to analyze video ads to pinpoint the critical keyframes. You can use these frames to create your unique ad, export them, create variations, or simply share them with your creative team.
Like foreplay, there are many more game-changing features MagicBrief provides to help you make an instant impact with your ads.
Conclusion
There you go. This is all you need to know on the Facebook Ad Library. It’s a great platform for competitor research, inspiration and uncover winning ideas to create high-quality converting ads. But it comes with some setbacks and can get overwhelming if you need a quick process or just getting started.
This is where you can turn to alternatives like Foreplay and MagicBrief which offer a plethora of easy-to-use features to discover, filter, save, organize, create and collaborate.