Spy on Your Competitor’s Facebook Ads

Hey, everybody, this is Adam from ParaCore, and today I’m gonna be talking about a huge update to Facebook’s ad platform. And, it’s not an algorithm change, it’s not a setting, it’s not audiences, it’s not anything you actually do on the advertising side, it’s actually what everybody else in the world can see, on the public side.

And, on the left-hand side here, on the screen, you can see an article from June 28th, which is yesterday, that is talking about a new level of transparency for ads and pages. Now, what does this mean? It means that every single person on Facebook can now go to your business’s page and see what ads you’re running. They can see every single ad that you are currently running in the Facebook platform, and that is huge. You’ve never been able to do that before.

About six weeks, or a month ago, they released this feature for political campaigns, where you could see all the ads that a political page was running, and can actually see, in that instance, how much money they’re spending on each individual ad, there’s a range. But now, every single business on Facebook that’s running ads has their entire active ads set visible to anybody that wants to see it, and that is huge. If you have any competitors on Facebook that are running ads, now you can go check them out.

So, if I jump on over here to Facebook’s, to ParaCore’s Facebook page, here’s the normal page. I can hit the Business Manager if I want. If I scroll down here, on the left, and this is on the desktop version, there’s a link here, now, that says Info and Ads. And, when I click that link, oop, sorry, I just hit the Events link right after it, this says active ads from ParaCore. And, as I scroll down, it shows all the different ads that ParaCore is running. And, in some of these, like this one, which is a Messenger ad, you can even hit the Subscribe button, and opt in to it. So, now, if you have competitors, or people are interested in your business, you can go to their page, or they can go to your page, and you can just see all the ads that everyone’s running. And, you can see the entire ad copy, CTAs, these don’t show links, but you can just see literally everything. And, this has never been done before, never been available.

They are also creating more transparency on the right-hand side here, with this page information. So, this says our page was created in 2010, used to be ParaCore Web Development to ParaCore, and they said they’re gonna keep adding to this page information section, to actually start providing more information about changes that are taking place on your page. So, all the privacy concerns that have come out with Facebook in the earlier part of this year are now really starting to propagate and permeate into different parts of the platform.

I’m gonna show you what this looks like on a mobile device. And, here is just a screenshot of the same page on mobile, and so, when I hit the page and then I see this info and Ads little link right here, once you click that, you see the exact same thing on your mobile device. So, this is a huge change. In AdWords and paid search, we’ve always been able to use SpyFu to get a feel for what ads other people are running. You can just go and search and see what ads other people are running. You can do a couple different things in the AdWords platform, but in Facebook, it was always a little bit of a black box. I mean, you would have to go and, maybe, get into their targeting, and, maybe, get a feel for how you’re getting targeted, but you really didn’t have that many options. You couldn’t see every single ad. Now, I can literally just go to any page and see all the ads that they’re currently running. I don’t believe this shows any ads that are inactive, I think it just shows active ads, so that’s one benefit.

So, if you’re interested in learning what your competitors are doing, you can do that. We’re also gonna start using this for all of our clients, and getting a feel for what their competitors are doing, so we can make sure that we’re staying competitive. And, but just remember, they’re gonna be able to do the exact same thing to you, which is kind of a bummer. So, check this out, this is huge. I think there’s probably a three- to six-month window where this is not gonna be widely known, and not gonna be as commonly known within the business owner space, digital marketers, I think, will know about it very quickly. But, you have a little bit of time to get ahead of the curve, because this was just done yesterday, June 28th, 2018, so check it out.

Again, by name’s Adam, with ParaCore. If you like this video, hit the Like button, or subscribe, or leave a comment below if you have any questions. And, thanks for checkin’ it out.