Practitioner pattern · Alper Taner
Check which competitor ads have the most versions and longest runs in Meta's ad library
What they did
In their words
Creative Misfires, False Positives, and Meta's Auction Flaws — Alper Taner, Stealth-Mode App Studio
Alper Taner… what works for competitors, we have overall trending memes or concepts or audios and such. And then you could have category level concepts. They're not really direct competitor concepts, but other big players that are doing well within your category. What are they doing? How do they advertise their product? So, what do you can learn from them? So, then you bring and merge all these datasets together. Then you decide on, okay, you know what?
Alper TanerOf course, you give a lot more weight to the Meta test results, but it is not a 100%, "Hey, this is it guys, dogs, let's go." So, it is about merging that. So, when you hypothesize the next iterations, it also should come from what worked and what didn't work, not only for you, but also for others. You can check the Meta ad library to see how long competitors are running a particular ad and how many variations of that. If there's one concept with 15 variations, and that is a particular, the only one that has 15 variations compared to other ones having just two and three, you should be able to interpret that. Likely, that creative is performing well for them. That's why they're exploring more angles. So, it is important to analyze and put enough resources and attention to the planning part of the experiment exactly because of this way and not just act like, I don't know, growth bro and, "Hey, this worked well, let's do to a hundred of them and so on." So, I think this balanced effort planning and executing matters here.
David BarnardHow do you think about analyzing competitor ads though? Because to your earlier point, there's a lot of people out there just following the playbook and creating 15 variations because they formed a bad hypothesis around... So, how do you actually dig into these competitor ads and try and figure out if it is actually working for them? And that's something I just see throughout the whole industry broadly is that it's too easy to overindex on …
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More from this episode
- When an ad wins, change one thing at a time to learn why before making moreExpert says it creates more winners; seen a concept's third variant win after two flopped
- Track cost per new ad that beats your current ads, not how many you testExpert says fewer, better-reasoned tests beat 500-a-month volume; no numbers
- Plot each ad's total spend against its cost per result to see when to stopBad ads are often clear by ~$500; one account burned ~$90K on a $100+ CPI ad
- When one ad eats 90% of an ad set's budget, give the other ads their own ad setOther ads often 'bloom' once the dominant ad is removed
- Keep the US out of campaigns with smaller countries; group countries by cost or value
- When a new ad keeps overspending its budget at the same cost, raise it fast5x campaign budget in two weeks with falling cost per purchase
- Set a $1M daily budget on Meta, but cap total spend and bids to control itMore high-quality traffic at stable cost for some accounts; others got no or runaway delivery
- Bid differently by placement or age group when their results differ by 20%+
- Tell Meta a trial start is a trial, not a purchaseCost per trial down ~35% with the same ads and campaigns
- Use MMP data to compare ads, but switch channels off to see what they really add
Tags: meta, competitor-research, ad-library, creative