facebook – Jeff Clark's Blog

Did you know that Facebook will let you search and view ads that your competitors are running on Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and the Facebook Audience Network?

Read below to see how, and skip to the bottom to see how to take advantage of it.

You can use this information to tweak your messaging, positioning or even your ads. Here’s how to do better competitive research, in real-time, using your own competitions paid advertising on one of today’s largest advertising platforms.

First, go to the Facebook Ad Library. You don’t need to be logged into Facebook to access this page.

Next, type your competitor’s name into the search box. Check to make sure that the “All” tab is checked, so you can see all the ads.

If they have run ads on Facebook you should see them presented on the next page. You can see here that UserInterviews is running a few ads on Facebook right now:

Each item on the page is a different ad they’ve run. Here’s one from Loop11:

For each ad, you can see when they started running it…

and icons for which platform where the ad ran. Here, this ad ran on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook’s Audience Network:

You can also see the exact advertising headline and image they used to get attention.

Clicking “See Ad Details” button brings you to a details page about this ad, and the page it ran on.

In this case, you can see that Loop11 only has one ad running, but ran multiple versions of it:

So what can you do with this information?

Click the ad! Check out the funnel your competitors are sending their customers through. Should you change yours?
Take a look at the types of ads they’re running to analyze their positioning. How is this different than yours? Are they speaking the same way to the same audience you are?
You can assume that if the ad has been running for a month or more that it’s converting well. Assuming that long-running ads are working well for them, what combinations of headline and imagery has been working for them over the long term? How should you react to this?

BUT, hold on. Don’t spend too much time worrying about what your competitors are doing and copying it.

Instead of reading between the lines of everything your competition is doing, you’d be better of spending that time with your customers instead.

A more direct, and proven, way of understanding your customers is to talk to them directly. ListenKit makes it easy to coordinate and schedule conversations with your customers, so you can make better informed decisions before your competition.

See if ListenKit can work for you.

There’s always a market to confirm what people want to hear.

Confirmation bias is real. Especially now, when we’re all under this new (and seemingly never-ending) existential stress between the pandemic, social uprising and politics. Right now, few people want to read articles that frustrate or upset them. So, you look for things that make you happy – by confirming some belief you have.

Content creators know this works. Just look at the titles of this article as an example: With Safety Measures in Place, Students Need Sports and Arts for Mental and Emotional Wellness.

Now, regardless of whether or not you agree with this take, you can tell who this is written for. The target audience for this is the parent, teacher or coach who wants to get back to a normal fall.

The article is written by the executive director of an organization with a vested interest in sports returning.

(To be clear, I am not stating my opinion about this article, just using it as an example.)

Confirmation bias isn’t just for articles and blog posts. Here are a few others that use confirmation bias as a business model:

US News and World Report college reports. “best bargains” or “best business schools” or whatever. If your school isn’t on the list, who cares? If it is, it’s NEWS! They know this, and give every school the ability to appear on some list by creating multiple lists of different types of schools.
Who’s Who – I think we all got one of these letters in high school. Nobody, literally nobody, buys this book to see who else is in it. You buy it to see yourself listed and to confirm that you are indeed special. (Sometimes called vanity publishing, which I learned while typing this.)

Scam or not, there are huge businesses which prove that confirmation bias is a profitable business.

Look no further than Facebook.

$70 billion in ad-based revenue in one year. Ad impressions that are monetized by engagement. Engagement that is strengthened when you spend more time on the site. And what keeps people on the site? Seeing what they want to see, and seeing things that make them happy!

If that’s not confirmation (hah) that confirmation bias can make a huge business, even Twitter made $3.5 billion in ad-based revenue in one-year. Billion! With a B!

Look, the takeaway from this is that feeding into confirmation bias can be a good and profitable move for business.

The other, more-nuanced takeaway from this though, is that revenue-led confirmation bias is going to impact the way information is generated and consumed for a long time.

It’s up to you to decide if that market is big enough to take advantage of, and if that’s a market you want to address in the first place.