Is Spying on Your Dropshipping Competitors’ Ads on Facebook or Instagram Worth Your Time?
Dropshipping is a highly-competitive business model. To keep up with the competition, you’ll have to always keep an eye on your competitors. How are they marketing their products? What kind of content are they posting? Who are the people they’re targeting? These are just some of the things you would want to know to improve your strategies.
One thing you should pay attention to is your dropshipping competitors’ ads on Facebook and Instagram. If you’re not yet aware of the advantages of spying on their advertisement strategies, let me list them down for you.
- Learn who are the people or groups they are targeting with their ads to become their customers.
- Get inspiration from their content to come up with new ideas for your marketing campaigns.
- Find out different ad types that you can try for your ad campaigns such as carousel, sponsored, boosting, and so on.
- Pick up ideas for your giveaways and promos.
- Discover other layouts for your Facebook and Instagram posts.
- Observe various ad copy that you can tweak a bit for your use.
When you have insights into your dropshipping competitors’ ads, the possibilities are endless. Want to know how they promote dropshipping products on Facebook or Instagram using ads? I’ll show you how in this article.
How to Find Competitors’ Ads on Facebook
The most reliable way of spying on your competitors’ Facebook ads is on Facebook itself. Here are two ways you can access useful ad information from other drop shippers.
Get ad insights through “Why Am I Seeing This Ad?” Facebook option.
Following your competitors on Facebook is a surefire way of seeing their ads on your feed. Once their Facebook ads show on your feed, click on the three dots icon placed at the upper-right corner of the add. A dropdown menu will show from which you choose “Why am I seeing this ad?.”
From there the “About This Facebook Ad” window will pop up where you’ll learn the reasons why the ad is being shown to you by Facebook. Here’s an example of an ad that I received from Clipman 2.0.
You can see that it is a website visitor retargeting campaign because I visited their website and I qualified to the criteria “people ages 21 to 55 criteria.” This Easyvsl ad, on the other hand, targeted people who speak “English(US)” that are age 21 and older.
The CTA button “Learn More” will take you to a landing page where you can either watch the video or order the product.
View competitors’ ads on Facebook Ad Library.
There are two ways you can do this: one, you access Facebook Ad Library through the competitor’s business page or two, you go directly to Facebook Ad Library. As Facebook already removed the Info and Ads button, you just go to the Page Transparency box on the right side of the page and click “See More”.
When the Page Transparency window displays, click Go to Ad Library on the lower-right corner of the window. This will take you to the page where you can see all the current ads of a particular competitor.
Just to be clear, I am just using screenshots of Dean Graziosi’s page as an example. He’s not my competitor and he’s not dropshipping products either. This is just for educational purposes, nothing else.
Once you reach the Facebook Ad Library page, you’ll see relevant information from there like the active or inactive ads, the total spent by page (this you can see only if the page has active ad when you visited ad library), etc. You can also check if the competitor is running Facebook ads in multiple locations by filtering by location. This will be useful in determining which regions in the world your competitor is focusing on.
Another way of viewing competitors’ ads is to go directly to the Facebook Ad Library page. Type the name of your competitor and hit enter and then you’ll see all the ads that the competitor has as well as other ad details.
However, if you want to look for other dropshipping competitors that are not known to you yet, just type a keyword on the search tab and click the magnifying lens icon or hit enter on your keyboard. I typed the keyword “dropshipping” as an example. Ad Library displayed all dropshipping ads which I can filter by location, status or pages.
How to Find Competitors’ Ads on Instagram
Instagram is another social media page where you can spy on competitor ads. To get started, search for your competitor’s profile on Instagram. Once you found it, tap the three dots icon located in the screen’s top right-hand corner. I am using Target’s Instagram page as an example. A menu related to the page profile will pop up, there you tap About this Account and the Account Info will be displayed to you.
Choose Active Ads to see what ads are running.
Instagram will show the ads in two formats, Feed or Story. You just tap on the format that you want to view.
Here’s the Instagram ad that I picked in the Feed format.
Key Takeaway
Spying on your competitors’ ads on Facebook or Instagram will be worth your time. If you have insights on how they are setting their criteria, what they are doing that are new and unique, or what ad types they are using, you’ll be able to improve on your campaigns. Learn from your competitors but don’t obsess with them. Never forget about providing great service to your customers because they are your priority. In the end, it will be your customers who will determine the success of your dropshipping business.
Want to learn more about dropshipping?
Dropshipping Business: 5 Free Marketing Strategies
How to be Successful with Dropshipping
Best Apps to Create Video Ads for Dropshippers
