Facebook Ad Library - How to Search for Creative Ads Properly

Facebook advertising library: free Spy service under the nose of every affiliate marketer

As in any other industry, in traffic arbitrage and affiliate marketing, relevant information is 90% of the success of an advertising campaign. Especially if this information is about the activities of competitors. Knowing which offers have a good CR, which approaches to creatives for a particular geo “catch” the audience best, which strategies are used by other media buying teams or solo arbitrageurs means being one step ahead. And although the market offers a wide variety of paid Spy services that promise webmasters to identify “gold mines” in a matter of minutes, most affiliate marketers and targetologists unjustifiably ignore such a powerful tool for analyzing competitors’ advertising on Meta platforms as the Facebook Advertising Library.

What is Facebook Ad Library and why do affiliate marketers need it

Facebook Ad Library is a free resource that accumulates and provides users with all the information about ads published on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network for free. The library displays not only ads from active campaigns, but also those that have long been discontinued.

Despite the fact that the original purpose of creating Meta this tool was to increase the transparency of advertising, affiliates use the library to obtain valuable and at the same time free insights. Using this public tool, you can find not only all the components of the ads, but also data about the advertiser company, links to its profiles on social networks, and even the history of changes. In addition, the Library provides open statistics for each advertisement. These statistics include data on the number of impressions, clicks, reach and budget spent.

You can also get information about the target audience of your ads in the Library, for example, region of display, demographic data, interests, etc.

Step-by-step instructions for working with the Facebook Ad Library

Even a beginner can understand the intuitive and fairly simple interface of the Facebook Ad Library. But in addition, it is worth noting several nuances that will help you get the most relevant information out of this tool.

First, we suggest taking a step-by-step look at the basic stages of searching for competitor advertisements in the Facebook Ad Library:

• Open the Advertising Library page using the link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library;
• In the drop-down menu, select the target geo;

• We enter into the search line those keywords related to the work vertical or even the offer that competitors could potentially use. For example, “slots”, “FS”, “sports betting”.

• Then we study and analyze the search results that correspond to the specified parameters.

The procedure is not much different from the usual search on Google or a paid spy service, but there are several tricks that experienced webmasters use for an expanded and more accurate search.

To get more accurate results, they use filters by date, language, pacing, content type (static or video format), and ad status.

You can also search for advertisements by the name of a specific company by entering it in the search line.

But in the case of arbitrage traders who use tens, hundreds and even thousands of different accounts and Fan Pages, this approach is not always relevant. In cases where the company name is not relevant, but the domain on which a competitor has placed a landing page or PWA application is known, it is recommended to use a domain search. In this way, the webmaster can find all the advertising leading to this domain and study all the offers that the competing webmaster is applying for.

Hidden features of the Facebook Ad Library: life hacks for affiliate marketers

Facebook's ad library provides more information than meets the eye. Here are some useful lifehacks:

• View ads that do not contain keywords. You can bypass search restrictions and view all listings for a specific region by using the "invisible space" in the search bar. You can copy this space between the quotes - “⠀”;

• Analysis of geo advertising account. You can find out which countries the advertising of a particular account is aimed at, which allows you to evaluate the strategy of competitors and find new promising geos;

• Detection of promising “gray” proposals. The library can help identify offers that are actively promoted through Facebook and Instagram, but use traditional arbitrage approaches, including cloaking, etc.;
• Analysis of advertising effectiveness. As mentioned earlier, in the description of inactive ads, statistics on impressions, clicks, and budget are available to users. This allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of the link and identify successful strategies of competitors.

How to apply the received information : from idea to profit

Gathering information is just the first step. It is important to learn how to analyze it correctly and use it to create your own effective campaigns.Here are some practical recommendations:

• Conducting a detailed analysis of the creatives of exceptionally successful competitors. It is necessary to thoroughly study the headlines, images, videos used in the campaigns of the leaders of the vertical with which the webmaster works. Don't copy blindly, but look for inspiration and adapt these ideas to your offers.
• Identification of new trends and approaches. Using the Facebook Ad Library allows a webmaster or affiliate marketer to keep abreast of new trends in promoting offers in the vertical, which he specializes. It is necessary to constantly experiment and test new approaches of competitors, introducing them into their own systems.
• Evaluating the effectiveness of different strategies. Using information about the budgets of competitive advertising campaigns, the number of impressions and conversions of inactive ads, the media buyer has the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of various approaches and strategies. This approach makes it possible to determine the most promising options for your own campaigns.

БіFacebook advertising library or paid spy services?

If we compare the Facebook Ad Library and paid spy services, the Facebook advertising library has enormous potential, but it is not without its nuances. Many experienced arbitrageurs include such disadvantages as a not very user-friendly interface, limited functionality and not always accurate data.

The main feature of paid services is a more thoughtful and user-friendly interface, an expanded set of tools and an ad database that is updated in real time. In addition, paid services often offer access to more detailed analytics.

If we talk about the disadvantages of paid spy services, the main one for many users is the cost of subscription. Often the minimum cost of a monthly subscription for some of these services can reach several hundred dollars per month.

Anyway, the choice of one of these tools directly depends on the webmaster’s requests, his budget, as well as the experience of launching advertising campaigns for both gray and white offers.

Висновок

Despite the fact that the Facebook advertising library is absolutely free, with a skillful approach this tool can help an arbitrageur gain access to a huge amount of information for profitable flooding into white and gray verticals.

Don't ignore this free resource. By introducing it into work processes, a webmaster can, no less effectively than with paid spy services, study competitors and current trends, as well as test new approaches, optimizing the advertising campaign in such a way that it brings even greater ROI.