Advertising dates back thousands of years. The first advertisement was created around 3000 BC in Egypt. A shop owner, while reporting the loss of his slave, also promoted his shop at the same time. Modern advertising, on the other hand, was initiated by an English businessman named Thomas J Barratt (1841–1914) with the advertisements for Pears soap brand. The first radio advertisements in New York in 1922 and the first television advertisement in the United States in 1941 each completely transformed advertising. The first internet advertisement perhaps brought about the greatest change. It was AT&T's "You Will" campaign on the HotWired.com website in 1994. In the internet age, changes followed rapidly and evolved much faster compared to the past. Google, or Alphabet Inc., can be called an advertising company. In 2022, it generated 58% of its revenue ($162.5 billion) from advertisements. So, what about the world's largest "social media" company? In 2022, Facebook generated 97% of its revenue ($113.6 billion) from advertisements. Google and Facebook control nearly 58% of the digital advertising market. The reason why businesses, brands, and companies that want to advertise seek success primarily in these two platforms is because of this.
If your Google or Facebook ads are successful, you've reached almost everyone you want to reach. We also take advantage of the opportunities provided by these two companies by managing our clients' Google and Facebook ads in the best possible way. Of course, to do this most efficiently, we use many tools. One of them is the Facebook Ad Library.
The Facebook Ad Library provides us with data and information that we couldn't gather on our own or that would take a long time to gather, even before we start advertising. Here, we can see ads that have been created or are currently running. We can view ads from a specific account or ads related to any topic. For example, if we're going to run clothing brand ads, we can examine how ads related to clothing have been done before.
Sounds great, doesn't it? Choose the most successful ad, replicate it, and publish it! This would be great, but there's a slight problem. The information provided here is limited. Concrete data that measures the success of an ad, such as how many times it has been viewed or how many clicks it received, is not shared. Here, the skill of the advertiser comes into play. For some, this library, which only contains a set of ads, is a goldmine for those who know how to use it. It can be used in many ways, such as examining what the direct competitor of a brand is doing, getting ideas from other advertisers, determining advertising trends prevailing in the market, and many more.
We can't access demographic information about an ad from the library, but it's still possible to do so, although a bit difficult. When you encounter an ad on Meta platforms, you can access demographic information by clicking on the three dots on the top right of the ad and then clicking on the "Why am I seeing this ad?" button. However, the problem here is that it might be a bit difficult for the ad you want to see to appear.
Data is everything in advertising. Data collection methods have evolved over time and have risen to unprecedented levels in internet advertising. Our task is to create advertisements by using this data in the most effective way. Examining past advertisements provides us with a lot of information. Therefore, the Facebook Ad Library is definitely one of the tools that an advertiser should use.
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