# How To Spy On Your Competitors Meta Ads for FREE!

Channel: Ben Heath
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s1iHL2mv0g
Duration: 11 min
Language: English
Words: 2592
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/6s1iHL2mv0g

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[0:00] Meta has recently made a big change to their ads library. And if you aren't familiar, the Meta Ads Library is a fantastic way to spy on your competitors' ads. And the best part about this new update is that we now have new data to assess how well our competitors' ads are actually performing. Let me show you how this works. This video is sponsored by HubSpot, more about them later. So, to demonstrate this, I am unsurprisingly in the Meta Ads Library. Um, it's a free tool, by the way, you can just search for it, search for Meta Ads Library, Facebook Ads Library, um, and it'll pop right up. You do need to be logged in

[0:30] uh, to a Meta account in order to be able to use this, so log into your Facebook profile or whatever, um, and you'll be able to to come in and use this free tool. Then we come down to this search ads section. So, the first thing we need to set is our location. Now, this is defaulted to the United Kingdom because that's where I'm based, but this is something to watch out for because the location you set is not where you are, or even where the competitor is based that you're looking to take a look at their ads, it's where the ads are being shown, where are they

[0:56] actually being delivered to people. So, for example, if I wanted to check out a competitor's ads where that are being run in the US, I would need to come in here and select the United States instead of the UK. Most of the time though, I'm just going to go ahead and select all, because if I'm looking at a competitor's ads, I'm happy to see ads, and I want to see ads, no matter where they're running them, so I'm going to go with all. But, you can narrow it down if if you want to. Then we've got ad category, again, I'm going to go with all ads, but if it's applicable to what

[1:22] it is you're looking to do, you can select issues, elections, or politics, and sort of similar to some of the the special ad category stuff that you see when creating an ad campaign. I'm just going to go with all ads. And then you can see, we can search by keyword, so if you don't have a specific competitor in mind, you can sort of search within an industry and look to find them, or you

[1:39] can search for a specific advertiser. So, I'm going to search for my own ads to use as, uh, demonstration purposes. So, if I just go ahead and search for Ben Heath, and then I pop up, right? So, I can go ahead and click on my account there, and not one of the accounts that is looking to impersonate me. Um, if you are going to come and check out my ads, make sure you do the same. Um, just one thing quick to note is that we've got um, the ads being demonstrated here are inactive. That's simply because we're actually reworking some of our offerings right now, so we're not actively running

[2:08] ads. We normally run ads every day of the year, but we're in a a rare time period where we've got them turned off for a few weeks whilst we make some tweaks to our offerings. So, just stay tuned to to that for that, by the way. Oh, and by the way, the new offer that I just mentioned is now live. So, we've got ads back up and running. It's called the Ben Heath Inner Circle, and as part of it, you can get direct feedback from me on your Meta ad campaigns for less than $60. If you're interested, there's a link in the video description. But, you can look at inactive ads as well as

[2:32] active ads. That's not something you used to be able to do, but you can look at inactive ads. Just make sure in filters, you've got active status as active and inactive. So, just one quick um, side note there. And once you come through to this point where you're looking at the ads of a specific advertiser, um, usually you would do this with a competitor, we can see some really useful and interesting

[2:50] information. So, firstly, how many ads? You've got 220 results there. We could change the filters to only select active ads. And if you do that with a competitor of yours, you might see that they're running 10, 15 times as many ads as you are. Uh, currently, that alone would be really useful information cuz might be like, right, we really need to up creative production in order to be able to compete. So, that's the first thing to go ahead and look at. And then we can look at all the details, you know, cuz you scroll through all the details for the various ads. Um, you can let's let's highlight let's let's choose

[3:19] a specific one. Let's choose this one over here and uh, dig in a little bit more in terms of the info. So, we can see when this ad was run for. So, June 18th, 2025 to February 4th, 2026, okay? So, that's again a good indication of how did this ad actually perform? Did they just run it for a couple of weeks and turn it off? Or, did they run it for a long time? Obviously, the ads that were run for a long time are more likely to be high performers, and those are the ones that you're more likely to want to model from when it comes to looking at

[3:46] competitors, thinking about what ads can I create and can I help um, improve my results by modeling from from what they're doing, right? The ads that have run longest are good places to start. We can see what platform it's run on, so was it just on Facebook, Instagram, where are they advertising? In this case, across all four. We can see the primary text. We can click in and see um

[4:06] the creative itself. Facebook ads just don't work. It's impossible. So you can see like what hook are they using? You can see there's two versions of me there. This is kind of done in like a like a skit style. You can see the headlines. Uh we can click in and see summary details. We can see there's the three variations of this ad that was run. You can also click on the call to action button within the ad. That'll take you through to the landing page or wherever um that advertiser was taking people. That's fantastic not just to be able to model from the ad, but you can

[4:32] also do sort of full funnel hacking. You can go be like, "Oh, okay, they're sending people through to a lead magnet page for an opt-in." Or they're sending people through to a page with a video sales letter. What's in their video sales letter? Is that something that we can look to replicate? So just fantastic information, loads of stuff um in here that you can use to model from. One of the absolute best ways to create Facebook ads that perform really well is to model from Facebook ads that have delivered great results. You don't need to try and reinvent the wheel,

[4:56] especially when you're first learning. And to help you do just that, HubSpot, who I'm partnered with on this video, have created a fantastic free resource that contains 50 high-performing Facebook ads. There is a link in the video description below where you can download these Facebook ad examples and find great options to model from. They've included ads for e-commerce, lead generation, SaaS, local, etc., which means no matter your business type, you can get great value from these examples. My favorite part is that it's all sorted by industry to make it really easy to find exactly what you're looking for. I strongly recommend you check it out and use it to level up your ad

[5:26] creative. Check the link in the description below and thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring today's video. So you can see how valuable this information is within the Meta Ads Library. It's a free tool that we've had a number of years and I've recommended advertisers use it. I don't think advertisers use it enough. But it became even more valuable recently with the update that I alluded to at the beginning of this video. And if I close

[5:46] this down, I'll show you what that is. That is the ability to sort by impressions high to low. So, previously we could sort by most recent, so we would see the ads that were most recently launched at the top. And if you scroll down, you'd get to ads that were launched a longer time ago. And my previous recommendation was to go to those ads that were launched a long time ago, but are still active. And if an ad has been active for more than 6 months a

[6:09] year, it probably is a best performer. That's the one that you want to study. You want to analyze and then you want to model from. And on the whole, I still think that's good advice, but it did present a problem and actually a problem that was getting worse given how Meta Ads delivery system has updated. And that's that there aren't many ad accounts, many campaigns with Facebook and Instagram ads that aren't active, have been active for months if not years, but aren't getting any spent. So, we cannot draw the conclusion that those are high performers and those are the ones that we want to model from. And if

[6:42] you run our campaigns, you may well have experienced this where you create a campaign, uh you put 5, 10, 15, 20 different ads within one ad set. Only one, two, or three of those ads get all the spend. And the others, you leave on, you don't bother turning off. They don't get any spend anyway.

[7:00] Whatever. And there's so many ads in that state, you could easily come into Meta Ads library and be like, "Aha, look, they've been running this ad for 18 months. Let's copy from this one. It must be a really high performer." And little do you know that it was actually getting no ad spend. It was just sat in an ad set alongside ads that were getting all the ad spend. But this this ability now to sort by impressions high to low gets rid of that. So, if you sort by impressions high to low and then start with the ads at the top, you know that these ads

[7:29] actually got lots of impressions. So, these are the ones that Meta's putting budget behind. And if they've run for a long time and they've got a lot of impressions, those you can be much more confident are actual best performers. because either one of two things would happen. Meta would stop giving those impressions and they would uh serve the other ads within the ad sets instead or they would keep getting impressions but the results wouldn't be very good and the advertiser would go in and turn them off. So, the combination of those two metrics, lots of impressions plus um been running for a long time is as

[8:04] close to a guarantee that it's a high performer for that advertiser, for your competitors as possible and those are absolutely the ads to go ahead and model from and try and uh and see if you can recreate the elements of those ads that led them to be really good performers for your competitors cuz those will likely be really good performers for you as well. Another thing I really like about this feature is it allows you to focus your efforts. So, often I've spoken to advertisers that have taken a look at competitors' ads and there's tons of them and taken a look at multiple competitors' ads and they're

[8:34] just like, "Where do I go? So overwhelming. What do I start modeling from? How do I know whether I should create one like this one or this?" It's like, "Well, just start with the best performers from your competitors. If you can replicate those, they'll likely be really good performers for you as well if you advertise similar ad products and services." That's actually a reminder to make sure you do this with multiple competitors and don't be disheartened if the first few competitors you take a look at, they've produced ads that you

[9:00] simply cannot replicate. So, and this often happens if you take a look at the really big uh monster players within your industry and you try and replicate what they do and you think, "Ah, okay, I can't replicate this. They're running partnership ads with a massive influencer. I don't have the budget for that." Or they've got really high-production uh value ads that's clearly got a professional video

[9:21] crew on and I can't replicate that. That's fine. You can discount those for now, might be something you're able to do in the future, but discount those for now. Instead, find other competitors, potentially smaller ones, but ones you are pretty confident are doing a good job and their marketing is is succeeding and look to model from them. And if you keep going and you look at enough competitors, you will find ones where you go, "Yeah, we could do that. We could do an ad just like that. We could do an ad just like that." Model from those, give those a go, likely to work really well for you. And when it comes

[9:48] to Meta ads and marketing, and to be honest, any form of business that I've been involved in, modeling is such a huge time and money saver because there are competitors of yours that have tested tons of different ad variations, tested loads of different offers, tested different formats, all sorts of things. And you can come in and benefit from all that testing without having to spend years doing it, without having to spend a fortune on working out the answers, and you can go in and you can look at their best performers, the ones with the highest impressions, and that have been running a long time, and go, "They've

[10:21] worked this out. I can start at this point, look to build on it from there." It's as close to a a shortcut, a Facebook advertising shortcut, as you can ever get, being able to model from your competitors. And don't just limit it to the ad copy and the creative. Obviously, do that, but also take a look at their landing pages. Think about their offers. What does their sales funnel structure look like? You can find out so much information that can, like I

[10:42] said, save you years and a ton of money. And speaking of things that can really help improve your results and save you time, go ahead and check out this video next because in that video, I walk you through the one Facebook and Instagram ad that you have to make next, particularly if you've already been running ad campaigns. Go ahead and give

[10:59] it a watch.

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