Your competitor's ads are not the benchmark you think

Meta’s Ad Library lets you see every ad any business is running. Google has something similar. Both are genuinely useful and both get used badly, usually by businesses that end up copying something that was not working.

What you can actually see

In Meta’s Ad Library you can look up any page and see their active ads, the creative, the copy, and roughly how long each has been running.

That is the full extent of it. You cannot see what any of it cost, how many people responded, whether anybody became a customer, or whether the campaign is making or losing money.

So the information is real and the conclusion most people draw from it is not.

The mistake

Somebody looks up three competitors, sees them all running a particular kind of offer, and concludes it must work.

It might. It might also be three businesses copying each other, which is exactly what happens when everybody in a category checks the Ad Library. One business tries something, two copy it, and within a month it looks like an industry standard when it is actually one untested idea repeated.

The same applies to volume. A competitor running fourteen ads looks impressive and might just mean nobody is managing the account and nothing has been turned off.

What it is genuinely useful for

Seeing how long something has run. This is the one real signal. A business does not usually keep paying for an ad for four months unless something about it is working. One running for three days tells you nothing.

Understanding the going offer. Not whether it works, but what people in your area are being offered. Useful context when somebody says your price seems high.

Spotting a gap. If everybody is advertising the same service the same way, the opportunity is often the thing none of them mention.

Checking you are not accidentally identical. If your ad looks like everybody else’s, nothing distinguishes you except price, which is the worst ground to compete on.

Creative ideas, not creative copies. Formats, angles, the kind of photograph. Taking the idea is fine. Taking the ad is both obvious and illegal if the images are theirs.

What to use instead as a benchmark

Your own numbers, which is less exciting and considerably more reliable.

Your cost per acquired customer against your own breakeven. Worked out from your margins and your close rate. That is the only benchmark that tells you whether to keep spending.

Your own account, month over month. Is the cost per lead flat, climbing or falling across a quarter. That comparison is valid because everything else is held constant.

Your contact rate. How many of the leads you actually spoke to. Nothing about a competitor’s advertising affects this and it matters more than most things that do.

An industry average cost per lead, incidentally, is nearly useless. It averages across business sizes, cities, categories and margins that have nothing to do with you.

The competitor question worth asking

Not what are they running. What are they not saying.

Most local categories have one or two uncomfortable truths nobody puts in an advert. The actual price range. How long the work takes. What goes wrong. Who the service is not right for.

Being the business that says one of those things out loud is a real differentiator, costs nothing, and cannot be copied easily because most competitors will not be comfortable doing it.

That is the whole basis of how we write our own pages, and we would recommend it over studying anybody’s Ad Library.

When to actually look

Once a quarter, for twenty minutes, to see whether the offers in your market have shifted.

Checking weekly turns into reacting to what other people are doing, which is how a category ends up with five businesses running the same ad and all of them wondering why it is getting expensive.