5 free tools for competitive analysis
What if we told you that we’ve found a way for a first-hand view of what your competitors are doing? Here’s a little secret that not many brands out there know about - and we daresay, their agencies neither! The secret: Ad Libraries! These should be a part of every marketer’s toolkit out there as it gives never before insight into what your competitors strategy with social media marketing.
The Meta Ad Library is a searchable database of ads across Meta’s social platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Whatsapp and other platforms. Some features of the library include:
Using the library you can search by “Keywords” or “Advertiser”. For example, it will be useful for you to gauge if other advertisers in your industry are using a certain style of ads, statics or videos or carousels etc.
From the ad, you can even see which platforms it ran on and from when it began after clicking into “See Ad Details”.
From the platform, you can also see how much advertisers (that you can find) have spent!
We find that the best way to use the tool is to use the tool to find by keywords for example if you are in the Interior Design industry, it would be useful to see what ads are being ran by other Interior Design firms by searching keywords like “Interior” or “Design.
While the TikTok version of this does not function the same way as the Meta Ad Library does, it is certainly no less powerful or in fact even more powerful. The Creative Center serves a source of inspiration for brands where brands can search by keywords and view the best performing ads filtered by:
Country
Industry
Objective
Time Range
Ad Format
Likes
Besides seeing the top performing ads, there are also a multitude of other tools that will be useful for any brand looking to unlock the power of TikTok. There are more than 20 available but the ones that we find extremely useful are:
Keyword Insights - to find out which keywords are trending in your industry
Top Products - using this, advertisers can find out which products to focus on selling that are trending
Hashtag Trends - this also gives insights into trending hashtags that advertisers can include into their post captions
As TikTok is a content and creative focused platform, it makes sense that TikTok aims to shift the focus on creating better and better content. Likewise, advertisers should do the same and look at sources like these to elevate the quality of their content to improve user engagement.
If you are a Business-To-Business (B2B) Advertiser then LinkedIn is definitely one of the platforms you’d have to be invested in. To find inspiration for such ads, the LinkedIn Ads Library comes in handy. Here you will be able to filter by country and search by “Keywords” or “Advertisers”.
However, besides the format of the ad being ran - all other details about the Ads are relatively scant making their insight into competitors’ strategy fairly limited.
Instead of calling it an Ad Library - Google has instead opted to call it an Ads Transparency Center. However, despite a cosmetic name change, the function of it remains fairly similar to the other Ad Libraries listed where brands can find ads that are currently being ran by other advertisers. Likewise, besides the format of the ad being ran - all other details about the Ads are relatively scant making their insight into competitors’ strategy fairly limited.
However, the benefit of the Google Ad Transparency Center is that it covers all of Google’s Owned & Operated (O&O) platforms that covers Search, Google Display Network, Youtube and more - showing many variations of the ads and also shows an advertiser’s strategy across multiple channels.
Other Ad Libraries
There are also other Ad Libraries like Pinterest Ad Library - it is potentially useful to find creatives from other advertisers based in other countries as inspiration for advertisers that are based in Asia. There is also the Reddit Ad Library - however you are unable to filter by country and can only search based on keywords or advertisers.
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Think that looking through each and every ad library is too time consuming? In MajorForm’s Brand Audit Services, we deep-dive into the available resources at hand to research about your competitors, analyse their best performing posts, benchmark and gather all those learnings for you.
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