After building your Shopify store, the next thing to do is to advertise on social media.
Advertising is an important aspect of marketing, as it exposes your business to more people in your area or to a wider audience.
However, it can also prove to be disappointing if you don't see sales. While it's easy to get impressions and clicks, it might not always result in sales.
If you are in this situation, one tactic that you should use is to spy on your competitors.
How does this work?
Essentially, what you want to do is to find out what your competitors are doing.
Apart from looking at their stores to get ideas, you also want to dig deeper into the ads they run.
Remember that even after choosing the best products to sell, it's equally important that you create compelling copy for your potential customers.
Let's take a look at the top six social media services that will help you spy on other drop shippers.
1. Social Ad Scout
This tool lets you know which advertisements on Facebook work and which ones don’t. The developers of Social Ad Scout currently cover advertisements from more than 21 countries, but you can spy on more than 30 countries if you pay for it.
It allows you to spy on both desktop and mobile advertisements of your competitors. In case this is not clear, advertisers have the option on Facebook where to show their ads.
If you know where a product is viewed most you will not waste money paying for ads on a platform that is not commensurate with your product.
The cost of membership is $147. It seems costly at first, but here are the features and benefits that you are paying for.
- Targeting Overview – once you find an ad you are searching for, you can view how that advertisement was programmed. You will see the age, countries, gender, and the kind of device that the ad is targeted for.
- Notifications – you can save some of the ads in your Favorites folder, and the system will notify you if it received clicks according to some keywords used.
- Downloadable Content – if there is an ad you want to copy, you can download the landing page of that ad. As such, you will receive videos, images, and even style sheets that you can use as a reference.
- Real-time Update – the system updates the information about the ads that you are spying in real-time. It means that at any given time, you will get the right data about your competitor’s advertisements. You will see who is reacting to it, what age demographic it is shown to, and so much more.
- Permanent Storage – ads on Facebook do not run forever. If the advertiser pulled it out, no one could see it anymore. With Social Ad Scout, you can save the ads after spying on them, and you can use the saved copies as a reference for later.
Social Ad Scout is simple to use. All you have to do is to type a text or URL in the search box, and it will scour the internet for Facebook advertisements related to your search. After clicking the ad, you can move forward with the analysis, and then save the content for later use.
2. Swiped
Swiped was made for marketers and copywriters who are looking for inspiration for their own ad copy. It is simple to use, as all you need to do is type a text, select if you want to see the control or tested type of ad, select the niche, and select the type of ads that you want to spy on.
The types of ads can be affiliate marketing, banner, animation, display ads, email ads, and so much more. After searching, you can select a specific ad that catches your attention.
What Swipe offers is a detailed breakdown of the advertising and why it works. For example, it will tell you analysis about the text of the ad, or what the picture of that ad tries to imply.
It is focused on telling you why the ad works, and how the advertisement appeals to the emotional and psychological needs of the consumer.
Here are the benefits of using Swipe:
- Free – there is no associated cost if you use this Spy tool. All you have to do is to subscribe to the website so you can get free updates.
- Analysis – for each advertisement you spy on, the site provides a detailed analysis. It will highlight important parts of the ad copy and then offer an explanation of why the text or the picture works.
- Library – it has a library of advertisements not just coming from Facebook. It takes a look at newspaper ads, too.
Swiped is a tool that allows you to search for ads, but only in its own database. What this means is that you can only get lucky looking for a specific ad. Think of it as a book of ads that were carefully analyzed.
The founders add data regularly, but it does not crawl the internet for live ones.
In this tool, you have to focus on what you have learned, and not on the exact performance of the ads because you will not get that information.
More Tips: 13 Best Ways To Make Money Online With Dropshipping & Stay Profitable
3. PowerAdSpy
PowerAdSpy is a tool that was built for the affiliate marketing business. It is a huge library of more than 5 million advertisements from more than 2 million advertisers.
The program supports 15 countries and allows flexibility when you use it. You can search for ads using text, and you can filter your search according to demographics like age, keywords, landing pages, gender, and so much more.
You can get the service for free, or you can keep on upgrading up to $149 per month. For all four packages, you can search for ads not just on Facebook but also on YouTube and Instagram.
Here are the benefits of using PowerAdSpy:
- Search – you can search by keyword, gender, age, and other advertisement elements.
- Recovery – you can bookmark the ads that captured your attention and review them later on.
- Filters – you have the option to choose only ads relevant to your search. You can filter by country, ad placement, gender, age, and others.
- Shopify – you can search for ads only coming from Shopify drop shippers. This is important, as it narrows down your search to entrepreneurs like you only.
- Call to Action – if you are at a loss how to convince your potential customer to buy or click your ad, you can use this tool to sort ads according to this
With this tool, you can find both image and video ads. It also provides analytics where you can see the engagement details of the ads, social interactions, and how they are positioned. You can also view the ad reach and weekly trends of a particular ad you are interested in.
4. Adsova
Adsova is a tool that lets you see the highest-converting ads on Facebook. With Adsova, you can view the performance of ads on both the desktop and mobile platforms.
You can try it for $1, and then move on to any of the three different plans later on. The plans cost between $69 and $129 per month, with each plan opening up access to different features.
Here are the features of the spy system:
- News Feed Feature – this one allows you to spy on ads released on the Facebook news feed of users. This type of ad is typically used for awareness campaigns, and you can get inspiration and ideas as to how viral marketing campaigns worked.
- Right Hand – this feature lets you spy on the sponsored ads that appear on the right sidebar of Facebook. Usually, ads like this are used for re-targeting purposes. You will get a ton of information about call-to-action and ad copies that marketers use to make a sale.
- Trends – you can receive updates of current ads that are going viral. If one of these is your competitor, you can immediately take action and change your ad elements so you can also benefit from the ad strategy of your competitor or make yours better.
- Tracking – you can track the performance of an ad, and you can learn from its performance trend over time.
- Live – you have the option to view ads that are currently running, instead of those that were archived. In relation to this, you can see a company’s advertisement history, and you can learn how they have changed their approach over time.
All the plans of Adsova are only available for five days, and each one cost $1 to try. The three plans are called Smart, Wise, and Sova, with Sova being the most expensive at $129 per month. It is also the only plan that gives you access to the live ads.
5. AdEspresso
AdEspresso is not just a spy tool, it is an all-in-one advertising platform for marketers. It comes at four different price points, starting from $49 per month up to $499.
Since it is a full suite of advertisement platforms, AdEspresso shows different types of successful Facebook ads that you can use as a template.
Here are some of the types of Facebook ads that you can spy on:
- Photo
- Carousel
- Slideshows
- Leads
- Offers
- Messenger ads
What you can do with the AdEspresso platform is to visit the sample ads and read the analysis done by the company. Each ad you click will show you the full advertisement, and explain the best practices that made these ads work.
As you read these things, you will get a clear idea of how the ads succeeded, and you can apply the same principles before you create ads in AdEspresso.
6. AdSpyHub
AdSpyHub, also called BigSpy, is an aggregation of ads taken from Facebook. It has a section where you can see only the ads coming from Shopify Stores.
The good thing about this website is that it is free to use, and the Shopify ads show you’re the previous week’s sales of the company that launched the ad. You can also see the company’s overall revenue.
If you click the ad, you will find yourself in your competitor’s website. From there, you can take ideas and inspiration, and use the same approach for your business.
Here are some features of AdSpyHub.
- Keyword Search – you can use keywords to search for competitors. If you used the “term “weight loss”, the system will show you a database of ads about weight loss.
- Reports – the site publishes regular reports that you can read. Examples of these reports are the top 20 advertisers for specific niches such as baby foods, business services, hobbies, and more.
- Blog – it has a blog that is rich in content such as tutorials and insights. All of these blog entries are about advertising, with a specific focus on Facebook and Shopify.
Since the platform is free, it does not have the same level of analytics as the other tools to spy on dropshipping Facebook ads. This is best used for beginners who need to get ideas on how to create winning ads, but do not have the financial resources to pay for a monthly subscription fee.
Summary
Facebook is one of the lifelines of any advertiser. It has the widest user base in the whole world, and advertising in the platform can help you reap massive rewards.
But if you are new to drop shipping and you have just built your store recently from scratch, chances are you are also an amateur in advertising.
As such, you need the guidance of experts so the ads you create will immediately produce good results.
With these tools to spy on dropshipping Facebook ad, you will not waste your money on testing. Instead, you have a clear vision of how your advertisement should be created, and what the contents should be.