As a business owner, it’s important to understand your competition.

Who are they?

What are they doing well?

How can you improve upon what they’re doing?

What would you do if you were able to find out how to target Facebook ads to fans of a competitor’s page?

In this article, we will discuss how to not only steal the fans of your competitors on Facebook but also a super-secret hack to find your competition’s most successful advertising campaigns on Facebook!

Can you target fans of other pages on Facebook?

The answer to this question is complicated.

Facebook does not allow you to directly target fans of your competitor’s page, but there are some workarounds that you can use.

We will go over how to target fans of other pages on Facebook in exact detail. this article will prove a step-by-step guide with images on how to accomplish this.

High-Level view on how to find your competitor’s Facebook fans

One way to get insights into your competitor is to look at their Facebook page.

Who is liking and following their page?

These are people who have an interest in what your competitor is offering.

You can use this information to your advantage by targeting these same people with your own Facebook ads.

By targeting fans of your competitor’s page, you’ll be able to reach out to people who are already interested in what you have to offer.

There are a few different ways that you can target these individuals with your ads.

The first is through Facebook’s audience targeting feature. This allows you to target people who have liked or followed specific pages.

Another way to target these individuals is through the use of Lookalike Audiences.

With this feature, you can create an audience that is similar to your existing customer base. Facebook will then find people who match the characteristics of this audience and show them your ads.

Both of these methods are great ways to reach out to potential customers who are already interested in what you have to offer.

By targeting fans of your competitor’s page, you’ll be able to tap into a group of people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.

So if you’re looking to take your Facebook advertising to the next level, consider targeting fans of your competitor’s page.

It could be the key to reaching a whole new group of potential customers.

A Step-by-Step Guide to stealing your competitors’ Facebook fans

For illustration purposes, we will pretend we are working on behalf of Home Depot. Now let’s start stealing your competitor audiences…

Hack #1: Find out who your Facebook competitors are

The first step is to determine who your competitors are. To do this, you can ask your customers who they also shop with. You can also look at online directories and search engines to find out who else sells products or services similar to yours.

In the case of this example, it is quite obvious who your competition is.

However, if you are a big brand like Home Depot, there is a super cool trick you can do to find your competitors straight from Facebook Ads.

To do this, open up your Facebook Ads Manager and click, “Create”. For this example, under, “Choose a campaign objective” select “Awareness” and click Continue.

Next, give your Campaign a name and click, Next.

Now you are in the Ad Set section. Scroll down until you reach the Audience section. Click the blue Edit button on the right.

Now click on Edit next to Detailed targeting.

Now type in Home Depot. After you click on home depot under detailed targeting, you will have a section below Home Depot where you can “Add demographics, interests or behaviors.”

Click on Suggestions.

Viola! You can scroll around and click on all of your relevent competitors and target customers who are interested in their products!

If you want to take it a step further, after you select your competitors you will see an Exclude option. Click on Exclude and enter your business name. In this case, we will enter Home Depot.

Now, you are targeting ONLY people who are interested in your competitors and not already interested in your business!

Hack #2: Find out what your competitors are currently advertising!

Okay, so this is by far one of my favorite things to do when launching any Facebook advertising campaign.

This one trick alone can save you thousands of dollars (or more) of testing to see what works with your business.

As a marketer, one of your primary goals is to stay ahead of the competition.

This can be difficult when it comes to Facebook Advertising. You may be asking yourself, how can I see what my competitors are doing on Facebook?

The answer is actually quite simple. Facebook has a tool that allows you to do just that, and it’s called the Ad Library.

The Ad Library is a public repository of all ads running on Facebook.

This includes both active and inactive ads.

The library is searchable by keyword, so you can easily find out what topics your competitor is targeting with their ads.

Step-by-step guide on finding your competitors’ Facebook Ads (with pictures!)

Now let’s continue with our example of Home Depot.

Since we already know who our competitors are based on our Facebook pages research of our competitor’s Facebook pages, it’s time to take things to the next level.

Step 1) Go to one of your new competitors Facebook pages. We will go to Lowes Facebook page.

When you get to one of your competitors Facebook pages, scroll down and pay attention to the left portion of their Facebook page.

You’ll see a section for the About section, Photos, Videos, then Page Transparency.

Click on, “See All” in the Page Transparency section.

Now you will have a pop-up like the image below.

You will see a section labeled: Ads from this page. And you can see that this page is currently running ads.

Click on, Go to Ad Library. (Can you feel the anticipation growing? 😃 )

And just like that…you can now view your competitors Facebook Ad(s)!

More Advanced Facebook Strategies: Running Facebook Ads that are already proven winners

007 Style Secret Agent Facebook Ads Hack: Here’s a sneaky little hack for Facebook Advertisers when they target competitors fans.

Let’s go back to your competitors Facebook Ads Library.

One of the single best ways to ad hack your clients to is find their best running Facebook Ads.

What you need to do on your competitors Facebook Ads Library is scroll down.

Keep scrolling down.

Hit the bottom of the page where the Ads end.

I want you to look at the date of the oldest Facebook Ads.

In the Lowes example, you will see that they’ve had an ad targeting Hisense refrigerators since February 3rd, 2022.

The time of writing this article is April 26th, 2022.

That’s nearly 3 months of running the same targeted Facebooks Ads campaign.

From here, you can also scroll up and see the other older ads that have been running for awhile.

Depending on how many ads your competitors are running, you will have a plethora of ad sets to choose from for your campaigns.

Finding these relevant pages of all your competitor pages provides you with all the ammunition you need to start running your own effective Facebook Ads.

Fine tune your Facebook Ads by doing this last step

Now I want you to click on one of your competitors ad campaigns. For this illustration, I chose one of the relatively new Lowes ad campaigns.

Simply find your competitors pages and select their ad.

Notice in the ad below you can find out a few interesting facts.

It shows you the start date of the campaign.

Platforms reveals where this ad is being served: Facebook and Instagram.

It also reveals how many ads are using this exact same creative and text.

Now you can click on see ad details.

Now on the specific ad page you can have a closer look at the ad creative and text. If there is a lot of text, this is the place where you can expand and review the entire text.

Study Your Competitors Facebook Ads Landing Pages

Now that you’ve found your interest audience of your competitors audience, you’ve found your competitions ads, it’s time to review their landing pages.

For this ad, we click on Learn more.

Guess what we discovered that is a flaw in this Facebook Ad?

They sent the user to a landing page specifically dedicated to Spring Fest 2022.

Now you have a great idea as to what you need to do for your business!

Create Ads directly targeting your competitors customers

So, what’s next?

Now you have all the ammo needed to create and generate interest and generate sales through ads that are already proven.

don’t forget to use your Facebook pixels to start tracking metrics on your site. Once your Facebook pixel has enough data, you can start creating a lookalike audience.

Target Competitors Fans with Lookalike Audience(s): Step-by-step tutorial with images

At this point you have stolen your competitors facebook ads through your interest based targeting that we covered.

You made your new ads even better with your own brand.

You’ve ran campaigns with interest targeting with the interest based audiences you found in suggestions; Lowes, Ace Hardware, etc.

What kinds of things can you do to take things to another level?

Bring in the infamous Facebook lookalike audiences!

Let’s get right to it.

Step 1) Head over to your Facebook Business Page.

Step 2) In the left navigation click on Audiences.

Step 3) Click on the Create Audience Blue tab and select; Lookalike Audiences

Step 4) Select your lookalike audience source: your brands page

Step 5) Select an Event Value. You will need to determine what best fits what you are trying to accomplosh here.

Step 6) Select your region. For us, it will be The United States.

Step 7) Start with 1% Lookalike Audience (LAA). According to Facebook, this is the reason why you should start by selecting 1% LAA:

“A 1% lookalike consists of the people most similar to your lookalike audience source. Increasing the percentage creates a bigger, broader audience.”

Step 8) Select Create Audience.

If you followed these steps, you will now have your very own LAA of highly targeted users that are interested in what you have to offer!

This is one of the best ways to steal your competitors audiences. Since your core audience is so similar to your competitors, along with their facebook interest, there’s no doubt you will be able to quickly scale your new LAA ads to the moon!

This is my exact formula that most advertisers and even public figures in the digital marketing niche don’t know about. This is exactly how you get more conversions and target the right people for your brand.

Final Thoughts and Summary

Now that you know how to target Facebook ads to fans of a competitor’s page, you might be wondering why it’s important. After all, wouldn’t it be easier (and cheaper) to just target your own fans?

The answer is yes and no. It’s true that targeting your own fans is usually cheaper and easier. However, there are some advantages to targeting competitors’ fans as well.

For one thing, you’re likely to reach a larger audience this way. And since you’re already competing with these businesses for customers, it makes sense to try to reach out to their fans as well.

Of course, you’ll need to make sure that your ads are relevant and interesting enough to compete with the ads that your competitors are running. But if you can do that, you’ll be in a great position to reach a larger audience and win more customers.

So there you have it! Now you know how to target Facebook ads to fans of a competitor’s page. Give it a try and see how it works for you. Good luck!

By following the steps above, you should be able to successfully target facebook ads to fans of competitor pages. Keep in mind why this is important- by targeting a larger audience through competition, you have the potential to reach more consumers than by only targeting your own fan base. Be sure that your ads are interesting and relevant in order to make the most out of this strategy! Good luck.

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