- All right, let me guess.
Your competitors are running Facebook and Instagram ads,
you really wanna know exactly how well they're doing
and how much they're spending,
but you can't get that info from Facebook.
Well, today I'm gonna show you
how to analyse a competitor's Facebook ads,
including how to read between the lines
to get some indication of that stuff
that Facebook just won't give you.
Let's get devious.
When we're analysing competitors' PPC campaigns,
we're normally looking at three areas.
Firstly, the targeting. Who are these ads being shown to?
Now, Facebook and Instagram won't give us that info,
so we have to kind of deduce it from various sources.
I'll explain a bit more later on.
Secondly, we're looking at the creative that's being used.
So how are these companies getting in front of people?
What sort of images, copy, and video are they using
and how successful actually are they?
And then thirdly, how much are they spending?
Again, Facebook doesn't give us this info all of the time,
so we have to kind of deduce it.
Again, I'll show you how.
Alrighty, so you probably know
that Facebook has this Ad Library,
which we can use to analyse the ads
that any advertiser is running.
So just go to facebook.com/ads/library
and you'll see this screen.
So you can choose your location.
You can choose your ad category,
whether you're looking at political ads,
properties, employment, credit.
We just normally go for all ads.
And then you can put in whatever advertiser
you want to look at.
Now, we're gonna look at
a couple of different examples today.
One is HubSpot. That's B2B selling software.
And the other is Cult Beauty.
So that's B2C selling e-commerce.
So I've chosen these because they're kind of at the ends
of this spectrum of different businesses.
And whatever you're selling and whoever your audience is,
you're likely gonna resonate with one or the other of these.
So let's take a look at the Cult Beauty ads first of all.
Remember those three areas that we're analysing.
The targeting, who are these ads being shown to,
the ad creative, and how much are they spending?
So Cult Beauty first of all.
We can see these ads are in the UK.
That's where Cult Beauty is based.
Targeting first of all.
Now, whilst Facebook doesn't show us the audiences
that these ads are being shown to,
we can kind of deduce the audiences
that these ads are being shown to
based on the copy and the creative that's being used.
For example, in this ad,
we can see it's focused on the brand NARS,
but the copy doesn't talk about a specific product.
It talks about the range of different products
that they sell.
So we might deduce that this ad is a retargeting ad
being shown to people who have been on NARS' pages
or who like NARS on Facebook,
whereas the creative in these ads isn't specific at all.
So it could be that they're using dynamic ad generation
to test loads of different pipes of ad
or they could just be using this copy
across a whole bunch of different retargeting ads.
Notice how the copy in this ad says,
"these attention holders are destined for your next haul."
So we can assume that this is some sort of retargeting
and presumably to people
who have previously purchased on Cult.
So we might call this restock retargeting
because it might be designed
for people who've bought a certain number of days ago
and the goal is to get them back on the site
to purchase again
Let's say, for example,
that we know the average purchase cycle is every 60 days.
We might start running restock retargeting
after, say, 50 days to get people back onto our site
rather than a competitor's site when it's time to restock.
Now, if we go all the way down to the bottom here,
we can see an ad with the copy,
"Enjoy 15% off your first haul with this voucher code."
So this is either gonna be a retargeting ad
to people who've been on the site
and don't already have an account, right?
Because you wouldn't wanna show this to someone
who already had an account
and who'd already made a purchase.
So this is either a new account person
who'd been on the website and a retargeting ad
or it could be a cold prospecting ad
to people who haven't bought before
but who Facebook thinks might be interested
in purchasing beauty products.
Now, I'm recording this video in late June
and this ad was launched in April
and is the only ad from April that is still running.
So we can assume that this ad actually is performing.
So if I'm a competitor to this,
I might be adopting this strategy for my business,
given that it seems to be working.
Okay. So that's the targeting side of things.
What about the ad creative?
Well, the main things we're looking at
is what type of ad creative is being used?
Is it like user generated content,
like front facing camera style
designed to look like the stuff
that people would be scrolling through
on Facebook and Instagram anyway?
Well, here it is not. It is product shots.
This is sort of Google shopping ad type things.
We've also got these product feature videos,
which I know Cult Beauty THG
has an in-house product shop place
that they can do this type of stuff,
but they're not spending a huge amount
of time and energy on this creative.
It doesn't look like
they're working particularly hard on it,
which is kind of interesting.
And if I'm a competitor,
I'm probably testing some UGC against this stuff
to see if it would outperform.
When you're analysing ad creative,
you can also look for what are the key messages
that are being used.
I.e., what does Cult Beauty think is really important
to make people buy from them rather than a competitor?
And honestly, I see none of that.
All I see here is this is a price sale.
This is value sales. This is money off.
This is discounts. It's your favourite brands at discounts.
That seems to be their positioning.
That seems to be the proposition
that they're taking to their customers.
So again, if I'm competing against this,
I'm thinking, "What are the key messages?
What are the USPs that can make me stand out against this?"
Okay. So that's the ad creative.
The next thing's spend.
Now, there's no way to tell
how much this brand is spending on Facebook ads.
Sometimes, when you go on the Facebook Ad Library,
you will see that data,
but for Cult Beauty we don't see that data.
So what we have to do instead
is deduce how much they're gonna be spending
based on some little telltale signs.
Now, the first thing is the number of ads.
This isn't a brand that's running a huge volume of ads.
There are some ads here and it's clear
that they're testing lots of different ad types,
but there aren't dozens and dozens
of different types of ad copy here.
There're basically choosing a few different types of ad copy
and then they're running variations of those ads.
We can also see they haven't spent
a huge amount on the ad creative
and they haven't really even tested lots of different types.
Spending lots of money doesn't mean
that you have to have a fancy studio.
It can be just testing
lots of different types of UGC style creative, for example.
And they're not doing that.
So we can deduce that maybe they're not spending
as much as some other brands on their Facebook ads.
Now, by the way, if you're a charity or a political cause,
you can see exactly how much your competitors
are spending on Facebook.
If you go to the Meta Ad Library report,
you'll get loads of stuff in this area.
So we can see that WWF have spent
about 6500 pounds in the last day across 104 different ads.
So you get loads of really granular data about the spend
and the ad copies for charities and political causes.
But for businesses, not so much.
Watching this thinking that your digital marketing
you know it's underperforming,
but you're not entirely sure where,
then there is some help available.
There's something that our company offers
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So just go to exposureninja.com/review
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Let's take a look at B2B example.
Obviously, the Cult Beauty is very B2C, is e-commerce.
Let's see how these same principles apply
in the same analysis of these three areas
works for a B2B brand.
So we're looking at HubSpot, which is a CRM software.
They sell software to businesses, basically.
Their target audience is sales teams, marketing teams.
That type of thing. Normally companies of 10 people plus.
So remember our three areas.
Targeting. Who are these ads being targeted to?
Ad creative, and spend.
So first up with the targeting.
How do we think these ads are being targeted?
Well, we can see that some of the ad creative
is things like specific features.
Link it up with your LinkedIn account.
And that's for running ads.
So this might be people who've been running LinkedIn ads
or maybe have expressed some interest
in running LinkedIn ads elsewhere.
We've got general sort of CRM type ads.
But interestingly, there's no call to action on this ad.
Here's another ad for their free CRM,
but again, there's not much description.
So I would expect that these are retargeting ads
that have been run to people
who have already been on the HubSpot CRM pages.
We've seen in a previous video
that HubSpot is investing quite heavily in their Google ads.
And it's likely that they're gonna be retargeting people
that have landed on those CRM feature pages in Facebook.
We can also see they're running some lead gen campaigns
with stuff like this State of Service Report.
They've got these free reports
and they're testing different captions here
to see what works.
And then they've got ads
featuring someone speaking at an event.
And it could be that they're running ads
to this person's audience on Facebook.
But overall, we can see that the targeting seems to be
retargeting for people who've been on their website.
Then we've got these buyer personas, these templates,
these downloadable guides.
And then we've got this stuff about coming to the event,
which we can assume is localised to near the event venue.
Now, one kind of interesting thing here
is that they've got some ads here
that have been running for more than a year.
The free social media calendar,
the free Instagram cheat sheet,
and how to build a brand book.
These ads have been running,
at the time of filming this video, for 13 months,
which we can assume means that they are working
and whatever targeting is being used is working pretty well.
So if we're a competitor to this,
we might wanna piggyback on this sort of strategy
and create our own sort of lead-gen assets,
which we can run these sorts of ads to.
Notice how these are pretty broad topics.
Loads of different business types of different sizes
are gonna be interested in this type of stuff.
So that gives us an indication
that HubSpot's casting quite a wide audience net
and bringing people in to generate leads,
which they can then sell the CRM later on.
Okay. So what about the ad creative?
Well, we can see they're not using a huge amount of video.
There are some videos here,
but mostly it's just these images.
The images are actually fairly text heavy,
meaning that the captions are sort of redundant.
They're quite eye catching with the colours that they use
but they very much definitely look like ads.
If you're scrolling through Insta and you see this,
you are not thinking,
"Oh, my friend's posted a picture of their breakfast."
You are definitely thinking, "This is an ad."
Now, the fact that they have used this sort of creative
in their longest running controls
indicates that actually it seems to be working for them.
So again, if I'm a competitor, I'm noticing that.
Okay. So how much are they spending on these ads?
Well, it's kind of difficult to tell.
They've got some really unique ad creative,
which involves like actors in a studio,
and film crews, and all this type of stuff.
So that's gonna be relatively high cost to produce.
But then a lot of this stuff is really image based.
And honestly, could just be boshed out in Canva
in a few minutes.
So it's difficult to work out how much they're spending,
but what we can tell is they're putting a lot of work
into creating these different lead magnets.
They're even running conferences
as a way of generating leads.
So it's unlikely that they're not gonna be spending heavily
to promote these things.
They've got this 2022 Marketing Trend Report data
from a thousand plus global marketeers.
Like these things aren't that cheap to produce,
so they're gonna be spending a reasonable amount
to promote these assets,
otherwise the whole exercise is pointless.
What's one of the most important aspects of any ad campaign
is the page that you're actually driving the traffic to.
If this page doesn't perform well,
the whole exercise is a waste of time and money.
If the page is performing really well
and it does a really good job of turning those visitors
into leads or sales,
then you're gonna improve the ROI of the entire campaign.
So in this video,
we show you how to improve the performance
of your landing pages,
including some examples where conversion rates
are up to 43%, which is absolutely ludicrous.
So go check out this video
and see how to improve your landing page performance.
And I'll see you next time.