The insights of Facebook Ads at your fingertips!

Ads on Facebook have become the most targeted form of advertising. With more than 2 billion users, it is a cheap way to have a big impact! However, it is also very competitive with more than 7 million active advertisers. As a result, you need to investigate what your competitors are doing, in order to benchmark your social media presence. Our new Social Media Feature gathers all the data from the Facebook ads library and it will help you fine-tune your advertising strategy on social networks!

Cross competition analysis of your social media presence

Active ads overtime

What is often complicated to see is how frequently an app is promoted on social media and how many ads are running at the same time. You can go on the Facebook ads library (a platform available on Facebook gathering all the ads running on social media), and filter by brand but you won’t have a summary of all the active ads overtime.

AppTweak gathers all of this data and shows you, for any date range, what you and your competitors are doing in terms of active ads. To be more precise, we will only take into account the ads that received at least one impression, which means only the ads users actually saw. In just a glance, you can immediately gauge your app’s social media presence against your competitors.

In the example above, you can see that Uber Eats in the United States was more active on social media from the 26th of July and the 13th of August compared to the other competitors. On the 30th of July they had 107 active ads running at the same time, which was 5 times more than the closest competitor: Postmates – Food Delivery. On the other hand, many ads were removed after the 13th of August which indicates that Uber Eats is not replacing its active ads by others overtime. This could be a valuable insight if you were waiting for more favorable periods with less competition to publish your ads.

The detailed table on AppTweak gives you a quick overview of the number of ads each app has running and on which platform these ads are running. This can help you know which channels your competitors are using to reach their audience.

When you look at the summary for the entire period in the table above, you see that for the selected date range, Uber Eats has been running 153 different active ads, almost twice as much as Grubhub. You can clearly see that, compared to other apps, Uber Eats is always posting on the four available platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network), whereas some apps such as Flavor: Local Delivery are only running ads on Facebook and Instagram which limits their impact.

Another noteworthy insight is that Uber Eats is running ads on 2 different Facebook pages, which may explain why they have more active ads than the others. Indeed, a Facebook ad is linked to a specific Facebook page, as a result Uber Eats may may be trying to target and reach different groups with 2 different pages.

Learn how frequently your competitors renew their ads

In the previous section we saw that the number of ads Uber Eats is running drastically dropped over time. However, we couldn’t say for sure if they stopped running old ads and decided to launch new ones or run only the best ones.

In the tab “New active ads” we show you when an app has launched new ads. Indeed, it is not extraordinary to have some apps run the same ads for multiple months. What is interesting is to identify the trends, how often your competitors are actually launching new ads and how many each time. This feature will also help you spot new campaigns your competitors are launching and help you get a timely response ready.
On the screenshot above, you can notice that Uber Eats actually launched only 26 new ads on the 6th of August but there were still 46 active ads running:
As a result, Uber Eats kept 20 old active ads. When we look at the other competitors, many of them don’t have the same activity and will post less than 10 new ads every 2 weeks. This feature is useful to understand the activity of each competitor.

Get inspired by browsing our ad gallery!

Understand the trends

It’s very important to know how many ads are running to leverage your activity on social media. However, when it comes to the visuals of your ads, you also need to understand what your competitors are doing and get inspiration. Each time you post an ad on Facebook, you can decide between many different formats, like the duration of your ad and the platforms on which you want to post them.

For instance, we analyzed the ad preferences of Uber Eats and we noticed that, between the 25th of July and the 25th of August, Uber Eats put more emphasis on Instagram, which is the platform that has been growing the most lately. In addition, they utilized the Carousel format and let these ads run 15 days on average. Uber Eats is a big competitor but it is still interesting to see whether they allocate their budget, more to Carousel formats, or more Image formats. The competition can teach you what the best practices are.

On the other hand, when we look at smaller competitors, such as Postmates – Food Delivery, we see that they mainly invest in Dynamic Creative optimisation, which is a way for marketers to provide a combination of images, text and platform specific preferences so that their system can automatically create the right combination for the audience. This is a format that would help smaller competitors better target their audience. Moreover, they kept their ads running for 31 days which shows that they don’t renew them as often as Uber Eats.

Get inspired in the Ad gallery!

Now that we have been talking about figures and trends, we can also show you what type of creatives your competitors are using! Quickly see what the other competitors are doing so that you can get inspired by their visual techniques. With our filters, you can easily browse through all the different creatives and types of ads your competitor has had running.

If we look at what Tinder is doing in terms of creatives, one can observe that they actually use a lot of Dynamic Creative Optimizations. In the example shown above, we see that they decided to have multiple versions with different types of women in order to suit the likes of the users.

Fine-tune your social media strategy now!

With our new Social Network feature, you will finally be able to track and weigh what your competitors are doing on social media. You will discover smart KPIs indicating the most used formats, the frequency and duration of new ads, and the most used platforms.Thanks to this feature, you will be able to learn from the best and adapt your social media strategy.

We know it’s challenging to get good visuals and insights from the Facebook Ads library, which is why we hope you will be as excited as we are by this new feature! We won’t hold you back any longer and let you uncover all these new insights about your app and your competitors.