Reverse Engineer Your Competitors With the Meta Ad Library

Stop Guessing. Start Studying Winners.

In this episode I want to talk about something that is extremely important, something that is going to take your marketing to a whole new level. It is called reverse engineering your competitors.

Here is the idea. You want to be able to look at businesses that have already succeeded. It is just like opening up my Marketing Magic book and finding out how Manuel Suarez wrote it chapter by chapter. What images he used. What stories he told. What content he gave. What strategies he talked about. Everything. So you can come up with your own version of it.

That is the whole point. You are not copying blindly. You now have a structure. You have something to start with. In the marketing game, you do the same exact thing.

Step One: Let AI Build Your Competitor List

The first thing I want you to do is open up something like ChatGPT, or your favorite AI tool. Ask it a question like this: can you name 10 active brands in the USA in the weight loss industry? Just like that, it gives me all these answers. Look at the speed at which it gives me exactly what I am looking for.

Now I have something to start with when it comes to researching what they are doing. The purpose of understanding what they are doing is to find something known as inspiration. I want to understand what other successful brands have done, or are doing right now, to make themselves successful. Because that is going to inspire me.

You can go deeper too. Ask for estimated revenue for each brand and see what data comes back. A lot of that data is not public and a lot of it is accessible, so it depends on the business. But you will be able to find real information about some of these brands and what they have going on.

The Ad Library: Forced Transparency Is Your Gold Mine

This thing is called the Ad Library. The Ad Library is on Meta, and it is a place where you can find out what other advertisers are doing. And when I say other, I mean quite literally every single advertiser. Everybody in the Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp world has to show their ads in the Ad Library, to every single one of us who wants to learn that data.

The word we use to describe this is transparency. For obvious reasons, Facebook and Instagram have been attacked publicly a lot, and because of that they came up with a system to show the world the advertising campaigns happening on their platforms. Other platforms are following in their footsteps. TikTok has an ad library too, though right now you can only see ads running across Europe. In the USA they have not allowed it yet, because of privacy or whatever it is. Who knows.

Either way, on Meta you can see ads being run everywhere. Pick United States, pick any country, or just select all. This is where you reverse engineer your competitors.

Watch Me Spy on My Own Brand

Let me give you one example. Let's say you are in the weight loss industry, and you want to compete with a company called NaturalSlim, which is my brand. Well, you can find out exactly what I am doing on social media very easily.

You go to the Ad Library, select your country, click on ad category, choose all ads, and then you have two options: search by keyword or search by advertiser. I search by advertiser and click on NaturalSlim USA. Notice something here: there is a Facebook channel with 2.1 million followers and an Instagram channel with 386,000 followers. I pick the one I want to check, and boom, it shows me 63 results of advertising campaigns that are happening currently.

How do I know they are current? Every ad shows you the details. It says active. It says when it started running, December 29th. It says what platforms it is running on. This one is just on Instagram. This one is running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. You can see the name of the page, the caption, the call to action, the button, and the website being promoted. One of mine says thousands of people have recovered their metabolism with the NaturalSlim brand.

Go Deeper: Click Through to the Landing Page

It goes deeper than that. I click on the ad, I click on shop now, and now you get to see what my landing page looks like. You get to see the elements of the page. What colors am I using? Am I offering free shipping? Do I use a video on the page? Do I add additional images? Am I using a long description? Am I cross promoting other products? Do I have reviews on my page? And so on.

You can even go through the entire process. Click add to cart and walk through it. You will see we have things called pre-sales, where I offer other products before somebody lands on the checkout cart. I am also going to do upsells and cross sells. If you are an e-commerce brand, it would be smart of you to try to replicate what other successful e-commerce brands are doing.

So you start making your own decisions about what you want to do yourself, because as you can see, we are obviously a very successful brand, and repeating the steps I have accomplished is going to help you. If you know your enemy, if you know your competitor, you will not have to suffer the results of hundreds of battles. Very powerful.

Search the Whole Industry, Not Just One Brand

You do not have to search brand by brand. Go to the Ad Library and search a keyword like weight loss. It is going to help me find competitors and show me the ads that are already running on social media. I start seeing all these doctors and practices and clinics and all these promotions happening right now. It is absolutely a gold mine to take advantage of. You get inspired, you get your creative juices flowing, and you get going.

I even searched a brand we have talked about before, the brand doing five billion dollars a year, the brand I want to be like when I grow up, except I want to be better because we do have a better company: Herbalife. They have 7.1 million followers on their big channel. I click on it, I see what they have going on, and I can even see the exact video they are running on social media right now.

That is it. This is how you reverse engineer competitors. This is how you win in the game of social media.