The Ultimate Guide to TikTok Ad Spying: Tools, Tips, and Tactics for Marketers
TikTok has exploded in popularity over the last few years, becoming one of the most influential social platforms across generations. The app now boasts over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide.
With this massive growth, TikTok has also become a major player in digital advertising and marketing. For brands and marketers, the platform offers innovative ad formats like TopView and Branded Hashtag Challenges that allow for engaging, viral campaigns.
As more brands flock to advertise on TikTok, there’s increasing interest in analyzing competitors’ TikTok ad strategies. TikTok ad spying has emerged as an important tactic for marketers to gain valuable insights into what’s working in their industry.
Spying on competitor TikTok ads can serve many purposes for a savvy marketer. It allows you to reverse engineer winning creative approaches, stay on top of the latest trends and innovations, and even estimate competitor budgets and spending. This intelligence can directly strengthen your own TikTok marketing and paid advertising efforts.
This guide will explore the tools, tips, and tactics to master TikTok ad spying. By leveraging competitors’ ads for inspiration and analysis, you’ll be able to refine your TikTok strategy and create higher performing campaigns. Let’s dive in!
What is TikTok Ad Spying?
TikTok ad spying refers to the practice of monitoring and analyzing the ads run by other advertisers on TikTok. The goal is to gain competitive intelligence and creative inspiration.
By spying on competitor ads, marketers can learn what types of campaigns, targeting, creative, and messaging other brands are using on TikTok. This helps inform their own strategy and campaigns.
Ad spying allows you to see what ads your competitors are running, who they are targeting, what their objectives are (views, traffic, conversions, etc.), what types of creative they are testing, and what their ad spend and frequency looks like.
Some of the key benefits of ad spying on TikTok include:
– Competitive analysis – See what your competitors are doing and how their strategy differs from yours. Identify opportunities to differentiate.
– Creative inspiration – Discover new trends in video creative and ad formats that you can take inspiration from.
– Audience research – Learn what targeting and messaging resonates with your target audience.
– Optimization ideas – Get ideas for better optimizing your own campaigns by analyzing the metrics and performance of competitor ads.
So in summary, TikTok ad spying involves strategically monitoring and analyzing competitor ad activity on TikTok in order to gain actionable intelligence and improve your own marketing strategy and campaigns. It is a useful tactic for staying on top of the latest trends and benchmarks in your vertical.
Benefits of TikTok Ad Spying
TikTok ad spying provides several key benefits for marketers looking to optimize their ad strategy:
Competitive Analysis
– Spying on competitor’s ads allows you to analyze their messaging, creative assets, ad spend, and overall strategy. This informs your own messaging, creatives, targeting, and helps you identify positioning opportunities.
– You can identify competitors running TikTok ad campaigns in your niche and leverage their successes and failures to improve your own ads. Their ad history provides a blueprint for what works.
Ad Creative Inspiration
– Analyzing competitor ad creatives gives you ideas for your own ad videos, images, captions, and designs. You can get inspiration for visuals, editing, content angles, influencer partnerships and more based on their top performing creative.
– Spying on ads in your niche helps spark new creative concepts and stay on top of the latest trends in video, image, and ad creation. You can model what engages your target audience.
Audience Research
– Competitor’s ads show you the audiences and interests they are targeting. This reveals how they define and segment their target market.
– You can identify new audience opportunities and interests to target based on observing the groups competitors are reaching successfully. Their targeting suggests niches and segments you may be missing.
– Ad spying provides first-party data on which audiences are responsive in your niche, beyond relying on estimated TikTok audience data.
Tools for TikTok Ad Spying
There are two main tools available for spying on TikTok ads – the official TikTok Ad Library, and various third-party tools.
The TikTok Ad Library
The TikTok Ad Library is a free tool provided by TikTok that allows you to search and view ads running on the platform. To use it, simply go to ads tiktok and search by keywords, usernames, pages, or hashtags.
The TikTok Ad Library shows you active ads along with data like spend, impressions, reach, etc. It’s a great way to see what your competitors are running and get ideas for your own campaigns.
Some key things the TikTok Ad Library lets you do:
– Search ads by location, industry, ad text, page name and more
– View ad creative assets like images and videos
– See ad spend, impressions and other performance data
– See ads from a specific Facebook Page or Instagram account
– Filter ads by date range to analyze trends over time
The main limitation of the Ad Library is you can only see active ads, not historical or inactive ads. But overall it’s an excellent free resource for ad spying.
How to Use the TikTok Ad Library
TikTok’s ad library allows you to view ads that are currently running or have run on the platform. Here’s how to make the most of this free resource:
Navigating the Ad Library
– Access the ad library. You’ll need to create a TikTok for Business account if you don’t already have one.
– The dashboard shows you top ads by spend, engagement and more. Click “View Full Report” to see more details.
– Use the filters on the left side to find ads by location, category, advertiser name and more. This makes it easy to analyze competitor campaigns.
Filtering by Category, Advertiser, Etc
– Filter by verticals like gaming, ecommerce, or financial services to see top ads in your industry.
– Search for your competitors by name to analyze their current and past campaign content.
– Filter by location to see ads targeted to your local market or other geographies.
– Use filters like “Last 7 days” or “Last month” to view recently run ads.
Downloading TikTok Ads
– Click on any ad to view details like spend, impressions, and more.
– Click “Download” below the ad video to save a copy for analysis.
– Use the downloads to study ad length, captions, hashtags, sounds, and other creative approaches.
– Compare against your own ads to generate new creative ideas.
The TikTok ad library provides powerful competitive intelligence if you learn how to tap into all of its filtering and sorting features. Take time to search for relevant advertisers and categories to discover inspiring creative approaches to inform your own TikTok ad strategy.
Ad Spying for Competitive Analysis
Ad spying on TikTok is an invaluable tool for conducting competitive research and analysis. By looking at your competitors’ TikTok ads, you can gain key insights into their marketing and advertising strategies. Here are some of the things you can learn by spying on competitor ads:
Research Competitors’ Targeting
Look at who your competitors are targeting with their ads. This can help you identify new potential audience segments and opportunities you may be missing. Pay attention to the gender, age range, interests, behaviors, and locations your competitors are targeting. This intel can inform your own targeting and help you reach customers your competitors may be missing.
Analyze Competitors’ Creatives
Studying your competitors’ ad creative gives you an inside look at what messaging and formats are resonating with their target audiences. Take note of the ad copy, visuals, videos, and CTAs they are using. See what you can borrow and iterate on for your own ads. Their creatives may also inspire new creative approaches you haven’t considered before.
Track Competitors’ Ad Spend
Monitoring how much your competitors are spending on TikTok ads can signal how aggressively they are investing in the platform. Are they ramping up or pulling back? This can help you determine if you need to adjust your own ad budgets to remain competitive. You may even uncover opportunities where competitors are underinvesting.
Identify Successful Messaging
Pay attention to the specific messaging that seems to be working well for competitors. This includes the framing, tone, hooks, and creative angles of their top performing ads. You may be able to model what’s effective for your own messaging strategy. It’s especially helpful to see what resonates for competitors targeting demographics similar to yours.
In summary, ad spying on TikTok provides invaluable competitive intelligence to inform your own strategy. Putting in the time to research competitors’ targeting, creatives, spend, and messaging can yield insights that give you a leg up on the competition. With these competitive insights, you’re better positioned to connect with your audience and achieve TikTok advertising success.
