Can I See What Ads People are Running on Facebook? Yes, yes you can.

It feels like I’m spying every time I check out whether or not a company is running ads on Facebook.

What are your thoughts?

Somehow you found your way onto this blog, before you knew it was possible, did it feel like cheating to you?

Because really, we can look at what our “competitor” is doing and copy her.(I put “competitor” in quotes because according to Wallace Wattles, we must move from the competitive to the creative, and I’d agree!)

Swipe and Deploy IS a big strategy in the Marketing sphere.

You see what is working for someone who has some similarity to you, and then you do your version of that.

In this case, let’s look at how to view Facebook ads

Viewing Someone’s Running Ads on Facebook

Let’s pull up Facebook’s page themselves.

You can see it on the full screen, but you see a closer image down below, where it says “Page Transparency” click that.

In this case, Facebook IS running ads, so let’s click on “Go to Ad Library” in the lower right corner and see what we get!

Based on the pages I’ve looked at, we get a heck of a lot more information about Facebook’s advertising than many others. On here, we can see how much in ad-spend Facebook has spent toward social issues (wait… it just hit me, why does Facebook have to spend money on their own site??).

You can filter for location (that is the same for the rest!) and for active and in-active ads.

It appears that Facebook is running vertical-video ads. Interesting. What can we draw from this?

We ARE a bit limited in what we can access.

We cannot get their analytics, we cannot see who they target or what works.

But if we’re tracking a company long-term we can see what they keep and what they change.

We are able to see what copy they write, images they choose (or videos!) and the format too.

I’d say that’s pretty cool!

If you’ve found anything interesting in your Facebook Ad research, let me know down below!

Stay Inspired,