I used to be a competitive swimmer.
My coach at the time told me to only focus on what was happening in my own swim lane and not worry about what others were doing.
That was sound advice but generally speaking, human nature will bear out the fact that we are naturally curious, so when swimming I kept looking around and the same is true when it comes to advertising online.
Looking around is something we can't help doing.
What we do here at Spades Media when it comes to managing Facebook Ads for clients is to be massively inquisitive.
Here's some of the reasons why :
- We don't control the Facebook Ads ecosystem
- We can't control the stupidity of clients competitors
- We don't own the audience we are targeting exclusively
- Understanding what competitors are doing can help steer us towards doing the same, or avoiding their strategy like the plague.
Quite often we get asked what other advertisers (or competitors) are up to.
There are now more than 7 million advertisers running ads on Facebook, so it's becoming a busy advertising space. Even though Facebook Ads have been around a while there is still much disagreement over which format of ad works, whether that is video ads, carousel ads, single image ads. What Call to Action works.
Lots of moving parts.
Trying to unravel what competitors ad strategy might be is an important part of the job we undertake.
Here's a video of the 10 step process Spades Media goes through when spying on competitors ads.
Would love to know what tools and techniques you use so please leave a comment below.
And, if you are the inquisitive type and want to put us to the test then let's talk.
