Here’s how to legally spy on your competitor’s ads and funnels.

The biggest mistake most online business owners make when launching Meta ads or a new funnel is they try to recreate the wheel.

No matter your topic or offer, someone is already making a lot of money online doing what you want to do.

They have made all the mistakes and figured out what works and what doesn’t.

And you can shortcircuit your success by learning from them.

Your starting point is the Meta Ad Library – https://www.facebook.com/ads/library 

Step 1 – Find Winning Advertisers

Start your search by selecting a location and ad type. I start most searchers using the USA as the location and “all ads” as the category.

If you know the Facebook page of a big-name advertiser, you can enter that into the search box. Otherwise, just search for a term people would use in their ads. Find an advertiser that has a large number of active and inactive ads; this a big success clue.

Once you find a winning advertiser, it’s time to find their winning ad.

Step 2 – Find Winning Ads

Now it’s time to pull on your investigator’s hat and figure out their #1 ad.

The ad library displays the most recently published and active ads first. Scroll down until you find the oldest active ad. The oldest active ad is usually the best-performing ad, as it has survived many rounds of optimization. Another clue to a successful ad is many variations of the same ad with minor tweaks to hooks or headlines.

Copy the ad’s text and screengrab the image or video into a Google doc. 

Step 3 – Find Winning Funnels

If an advertiser invests heavily in ads, you can be 99% sure their funnel is profitable.

Click the link in the ad and go through your competitors’ funnel. Opt into their lead magnets and buy their mini-products to understand their funnel flow. I use an awesome Chrome plugin, GoFullPage, to capture opt-in, upsell, and offer pages to PDF to add to my swipe file library.  

So what next?

Copying someone else funnel word for word will never work.

Your job now is to understand why their funnel works and how you can model their success in your funnel.

They’ve invested a lot of money to get their ads and funnels to where they are today. 

You can short-circuit your process by learning from their mistakes and success.