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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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Facebook ads and info
Social advertisement has opened doors on Facebook for marketers. When it comes to Facebook ads and info, I would first like to put forth a question for all you social media marketers. Have you ever spied on your competitors? Above all, their ads?
Of course, you all have. Why am I excluding me? In fact, we all have. We all do, and furthermore, we’ll keep doing. Generally, it is terribly difficult to find their ads. This consequently would take up a whole lot of time and efforts during your social media marketing strategy or any research for that matter. Anyone from social media management would agree to this.
Well, here’s the good news. Whether it’s a business page on Facebook or any other promotion for that matter, Facebook ads have now made this extremely easy. So easy that you can find all your competitors’ ads or anyone’s ads for that matter (if they are running ads, that is).
So why did Facebook do this? Here’s what Facebook had to say: “We’re taking significant steps to bring more transparency to ads and Pages on Facebook. Giving people more information about any organization and the ads it’s currently running will mean increased accountability for bad actors, which will help to prevent abuse on Facebook. Our mission is focused on giving people a voice and bringing everyone closer together. We’re taking these steps as part of our efforts to prevent election interference and protect against bad actors. And of course, to provide people with more information about what they see on Facebook. By the way, that is a good way, when you are pitching to your prospective clients, to find out whether they are running ads and if at all they are, what is wrong with them.”
Benefits which you can get from this new feature
You can learn from competitors and brands who have become experts of Facebook ads.
You can audit your own creative concerning competitors to find any areas of creative opportunity you may not have taken advantage of.
Growing brands looking to step up a level on their competition can find out what is working for them and use that information to optimize their own ad campaigns.
Here’s a quick hack
If you’re looking for discounts, offers, and coupon codes, look in the info and ads section. You might stumble upon some treasures if big companies like Snapdeal or Zomato are giving discounts for selective users through their ads targeting.
Quick tip
In particular, using Offer ads will be the only way to keep promotions hidden from outside the target audience.
Caution
However, this also means that your ads have also become transparent. Your competitors can view all of your Page’s ads. As consumers can see all of your ads, in short, you must be extra careful.
A final takeaway
Spy on your competitor’s ads as much as you want, learn how you can improve your ads and creatives linked to it, and constantly try to up your ante.
Facebook's 'Info and Ads' section is a public database, accessible via any Facebook Page, that displays all active advertisements a Page is currently running across the platform. This tool was introduced primarily to increase transparency and accountability following concerns about its use for election interference, aiming to expose bad actors and prevent abuse.
For marketers, this initiative has an immensely practical, albeit secondary, benefit. It provides a direct window into the advertising strategies of any other business on the platform. By making ads public, Facebook leveled the playing field for intelligence gathering. You can now systematically analyze:
Creative Approaches: See the exact visuals, copy, and formats that competitors or industry leaders are using.
Promotional Cadence: Understand the frequency and type of offers they are pushing to their audience.
Campaign Diversity: Observe if they are testing different messages for different products or audience segments.
For example, seeing how a company like Zomato structures its campaigns can offer direct insights. This transparency turns the entire platform into a live case study, providing you with the intelligence needed to refine your own strategy. Dive deeper to learn how to turn this public data into a private competitive advantage.
The end of advertising secrecy on Facebook requires a strategic shift from hiding your tactics to simply executing them better than anyone else. Your competitive edge now lies in public-facing excellence, as any successful campaign will be quickly seen and analyzed by competitors.
To thrive in this transparent environment, your long-term strategy must prioritize three core areas:
Superior Audience Understanding: While your ad creatives are public, your specific targeting parameters are not. The deepest advantage comes from a richer understanding of your audience, allowing you to create messages that resonate with a precision competitors cannot easily replicate.
High-Tempo Creative Iteration: Your team must become a factory for testing and learning. The ability to launch, analyze, and refresh creative at a faster pace than your competition is now a critical differentiator.
Authentic Brand Narrative: A compelling brand story is far more difficult to copy than a 20% off coupon. Consistently integrating a strong, unique brand voice into every ad creates a defensive moat around your marketing efforts.
This new reality rewards agility and quality over concealment. Learn more about building a resilient ad strategy for an era of total transparency.
Using the Facebook ad library for competitive analysis is a direct way to gather actionable intelligence and accelerate your brand's growth. It allows you to learn from the multi-million dollar ad spends of established players like Snapdeal without spending a dime on research.
A simple, effective process involves these key steps:
Navigate to Their Page: Go to your competitor’s Facebook Page, find the 'Page Transparency' section, and click through to the Ad Library.
Analyze Ad Creatives: Scrutinize their visuals, headlines, and ad copy. Are they using video, carousels, or static images? What emotional triggers or value propositions are they highlighting?
Deconstruct Their Offers: Identify the types of promotions they are running. Are they focused on percentage discounts, free shipping, or bundle deals? This reveals their customer acquisition strategy.
Identify Untapped Opportunities: Look for gaps. If their ads are all product-focused, you might have an opening for more lifestyle or brand-oriented content.
By systematically breaking down their approach, you can identify what is working in your market and find creative white space to make your own ads stand out. Explore the full article to master the art of turning competitor research into campaign success.
The most common mistake is continuing with a 'set it and forget it' ad strategy that is easy for competitors to study and replicate. In this transparent environment, a predictable, stagnant campaign is a significant vulnerability, as it gives your rivals ample time to dissect and counter your every move.
To avoid this pitfall, you must shift your mindset from long-term campaign secrecy to strategic agility and layered promotions. A stronger approach involves:
Dynamic Creative Rotation: Constantly test and introduce new ad creatives to keep your messaging fresh and your competitors guessing. A high rate of iteration prevents any single ad from becoming your entire public-facing strategy.
Using Offer Ads Strategically: The text mentions that Offer ads can be a way to keep promotions more contained. While the ad is visible, the redemption mechanics are tied to the targeted user, creating a slight barrier to casual spying.
Focusing on Brand over Promotion: Competitors can easily copy a discount, but they cannot copy your brand's unique voice and connection with its audience. Invest in ads that build brand equity.
By being less predictable and more brand-focused, you make your strategy much harder to reverse-engineer. Discover more tactics for protecting your competitive edge in a transparent world.
Limiting ad library research to direct competitors is a missed opportunity for breakthrough creativity. A savvy marketing team at a company like Zomato can gain a significant edge by studying top advertisers in unrelated sectors like fashion, gaming, or finance, revealing universal principles of persuasion.
This cross-industry analysis provides powerful insights that are often absent within a single market vertical. For example:
A gaming company’s ads can teach a food delivery app about creating compelling short-form video hooks and driving urgent calls-to-action.
A direct-to-consumer fashion brand can provide a masterclass in using user-generated content and influencer collaborations to build social proof.
A fintech app’s ad campaign can demonstrate how to simplify a complex value proposition into clear, benefit-driven messaging.
By looking outside your echo chamber, you can identify and adapt novel ad formats and storytelling techniques before they become commonplace in your own industry. This approach is key to developing a truly distinct and memorable ad presence. Read on for more ways to find creative inspiration in unexpected places.
Yes, this feature can be used as a 'hack' to uncover targeted promotions that you would not otherwise see in your own feed. It reveals that while targeting is precise, the ad creative itself, including the offer, is public knowledge.
Here is how it works: A company like Zomato might run a campaign offering a 30% discount on orders over a certain value, but they target this ad exclusively to users in Mumbai who have not ordered in the last 60 days. An individual outside that audience would never see the ad. However, by visiting Zomato's Facebook Page and accessing their ad library, anyone can view that active ad and its promotional code. This demonstrates that brands are using hyper-targeted offers to reactivate specific user segments. For marketers, the takeaway is that your 'exclusive' offers are not truly private. This knowledge should inform how you structure promotions, perhaps using unique, single-use codes when true exclusivity is critical. Uncover more clever ways to use the ad library for both consumer and professional advantage.
Analyzing ad creatives and promotional offers both provide critical intelligence, but they inform different parts of your strategy and their value depends on your immediate business goals. One is about brand, the other is about conversion.
Analyzing ad creatives involves looking at their visuals, copy, and messaging. This tells you how they are positioning their brand, what stories they are telling, and what kind of emotional connection they are trying to build with their audience. Insights from this analysis are actionable for strengthening your own brand identity and differentiating your messaging. In contrast, analyzing promotional offers focuses on their discounts, calls-to-action, and sales funnels. This reveals their direct customer acquisition tactics and pricing strategy. For a business trying to scale quickly, analyzing promotional offers can provide immediately actionable ideas for competitive sales campaigns. Ultimately, a balanced approach is best, but if you must prioritize, start with creative analysis to build a sustainable brand, then use offer analysis to fuel short-term growth. Learn how to integrate both types of analysis for a complete competitive picture.
The Facebook ad library is an invaluable, ethical tool for pre-pitch intelligence that allows you to shift from a generic sales pitch to a specific, data-informed consultation. It empowers you to diagnose problems before you even walk into the meeting, demonstrating immediate value.
Before meeting a prospective client, you can use their ad library to conduct a rapid audit. Look for common red flags:
Inconsistent Messaging: Are their ads communicating a clear and unified brand message?
Lack of Format Variety: Are they relying solely on static images and missing out on the higher engagement of video or carousel ads?
Weak Calls-to-Action (CTAs): Do their ads clearly tell the user what to do next?
No Active Ads: The most telling sign of all is an empty ad library, representing a massive missed opportunity.
By identifying these specific shortcomings, you can tailor your pitch to offer concrete solutions, such as, “I noticed you aren't currently running ads; our first step would be to launch a brand awareness campaign.” This evidence-based approach positions you as a strategic partner, not just a vendor. Discover how to use this tool to build stronger client proposals.
A Facebook Offer ad is a distinct ad format designed to deliver discounts or promotions that users can save, get reminders about, and redeem either online or in-store. Its primary distinction is that it creates a structured 'offer' entity within Facebook, rather than just showing a promo code in a standard image or video ad.
This format provides a subtle but important advantage in an era of total transparency. While the ad creative itself will appear in your public ad library for competitors to see, the mechanics of claiming the offer are more insulated. The promotion is designed to be saved and used by the specifically targeted audience. This creates a barrier compared to a simple, universal discount code that can be easily copied and shared. A competitor spying on your ads would see the promotion, but it is less of a public broadcast and more of a direct invitation to a select group. It is a strategic choice for running targeted campaigns, like those from Snapdeal, without making the deal feel like a free-for-all. Explore how different ad formats can provide unique strategic advantages.
The perception of transparency as a threat stems from a fear of being copied, but this fear is only valid for brands with stagnant strategies. Proactive, agile companies reframe transparency as a source of free, continuous market intelligence that can be used to drive innovation.
You can turn this defensive posture into an offensive advantage by establishing a routine internal audit process:
Benchmark Against the Best: Identify 3-5 top competitors and aspirational brands, and schedule a monthly or quarterly review of their ad libraries.
Map Their Creative Strategy: Document the types of visuals, messaging themes, and ad formats they are deploying. Note any new trends or tests they appear to be running.
Identify Your Creative Gaps: Compare their output to your own. Are they using video more effectively? Is their copy more emotionally resonant? Are they tapping into cultural moments that you are missing?
This process of constant competitive benchmarking transforms the ad library from a tool for spying into a roadmap for your own creative improvement, ensuring you are always learning and evolving. Learn more about building a culture of continuous improvement for your ad campaigns.
Facebook explicitly cited election integrity and exposing bad actors as the core reasons for creating the ad library, largely in response to intense public and regulatory scrutiny over the platform's role in political discourse. By making all ads public, especially political ones, Facebook aimed to increase accountability and make it much harder for malicious entities to operate in the shadows.
This politically-motivated initiative provides significant, if indirect, benefits for regular business advertisers. A platform actively working to curb abuse and misinformation creates a more trustworthy ecosystem for everyone. When users have greater confidence in the platform and feel safer from manipulation, they are more likely to engage positively with all content, including commercial advertisements. For a brand like Snapdeal, this means their legitimate promotions are seen in a cleaner, more credible environment, which can improve ad performance and brand perception. The pursuit of political integrity ultimately fosters a healthier commercial marketplace. Explore the broader implications of platform accountability for advertisers.
The shift towards universal ad transparency signals the end of relying on 'secret' tactics for a competitive edge. Future success will be defined not by what you do, but by how well you do it in plain sight, requiring marketing teams to cultivate a new set of core skills.
Three competencies will become paramount:
Radical Creative Agility: The lifecycle of a winning ad creative will shorten as competitors quickly identify and adapt to successful formulas. Teams must master rapid testing, learning, and iteration to stay ahead.
Deep Audience Empathy: With targeting methods remaining private, the most durable advantage lies in a profound, data-backed understanding of your customer. This allows for the creation of messaging so resonant that it cannot be easily replicated.
Unshakeable Brand Storytelling: A discount is easy to copy, but a genuine brand narrative is not. The ability to weave a consistent and compelling story across all ads will be the ultimate differentiator.
Teams that invest in these areas will thrive, as their advantage is built on quality and insight, not secrecy. Read on to learn how to build a marketing team that is prepared for the future of advertising.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
