How To Analyze a Competitor’s Advertising Strategy Without Spending a Fortune

These days, competition for consumers' attention online is fierce. That means digital advertisers have two realistic paths to success. They can outspend the competition to create a deluge of ads consumers can't avoid, or they can work hard to use a smaller marketing budget more efficiently.

Most companies can't afford the former strategy. Unfortunately, the latter approach often requires a fair amount of market expertise that most smaller businesses don't have. However, there is an affordable way for smaller firms to borrow that expertise at little cost.

They can do it by analyzing the advertising tactics of their competitors—particularly larger ones—to identify a performant strategy to emulate. Here are a few simple ways small companies can peer into their competitors' advertising strategies without spending a fortune.

Act Like a Consumer#

The simplest way to check out a competitor's advertising strategy is to act like a consumer. If you trigger a competitor's retargeting process, their ads will find you. Begin by visiting the competitor's website and exploring it like a potential customer might.

Click through product pages, information pages, and blog posts if available. If the site handles direct sales, add relevant items to your shopping cart (abandoned shopping carts are sure to trigger retargeting). Once you've spent a decent amount of time on the competitor's site, leave. You can also interact with the content on social media platforms that they use.

You'll soon find the competitor's ads popping up on search result pages, social media sites, and almost everywhere else that accepts ads. You should catalog those ads, take screenshots, and list the specifics of the ad's appearance.

That will help you correlate what kinds of ads your competitor deploys on relevant platforms. You should pay extra attention to the social sites to which your company plans to devote its advertising dollars.

However, you should always do your due diligence on the current social media landscape before allocating your advertising dollars to any particular platform.

Consult Advertising Libraries#

Multiple online advertising libraries can provide direct access to competitor ad materials. Some exist in the interest of advertising transparency, while others exist specifically for market research purposes. Two of the most valuable ad libraries belong to Meta and Google.

You can access the Meta Ad Library as often as you want with no restrictions. It contains every active Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Meta Audience Network ad. Since Meta controls the world's second-largest ad platform, you'll likely find competitor ads in its database. Plus, it provides versioning information, which can help you figure out your competitor's performance testing strategy.

Google's Ads Transparency Center works like Meta's equivalent. However, it covers a much larger swath of the global advertising market. On it, you'll find all of the ads running on Google's vast display network, as well as YouTube and Google itself. One drawback is that there's little versioning data, and it only includes ads from verified publishers.

Finally, there's a commercially available TikTok Ads Library as well. It gives you access to millions of ads running on TikTok, with various handy features. It will show you engagement metrics and real-time interaction analytics, for example.

It also supports complex search expressions, so you can make granular use of the database as your research needs grow more specific.

Use Competitive and Ad Intelligence Tools#

Finally, there are purpose-built tools designed to help marketers conduct competitor research. They fall into two broad categories. One is called competitive intelligence. Their primary purpose is to let businesses track competitors' marketing activities, performance, and market presence over time.

They also allow you to monitor the competition for strategic shifts, new product introductions, and new business initiatives. Many even give users powerful sentiment analysis tools to provide insights into consumers' feelings about competitors.

Competitive intelligence tools go well beyond advertising, however. As a result, they may be costly and better suited to broader marketing strategy development rather than simple ad research.

The other category of tools is ad intelligence tools. They're more narrowly focused and contain compiled multi-channel advertising data only. They typically contain a wealth of information, including channel breakdowns, publisher site data, monthly ad views, and more.

They can help you contextualize some of the information you glean from ad libraries to make it more useful. An ad intelligence tool lets you gain a 10,000-foot view of your competitor's overall ad strategy.

Then, you can work backward to develop a competing or counter-strategy using your compiled competitor data.

Useful Insights Yield Actionable Results#

Any company can devise a high-performance advertising strategy using the widely available tools and strategies detailed here. All it takes is careful research and a willingness to find the logic in a competitor's advertising approach.

Doing so can obviate the need to hire marketing specialists, saving precious marketing dollars that would be better spent elsewhere. That means more ads reaching more potential customers, and that's always the best use of a business's money.