A folder of screenshots and not one piece of evidence
The part of a competitor's ad you screenshotted is the part worth the least.
You have a folder somewhere. Screenshots of other people's ads, saved because something in them landed on you. How many have you turned into an ad of your own?
Probably none, and that is not a discipline problem. The screenshot is the problem. It keeps the picture and the line, and it throws away the only two things in that ad that were ever evidence.
The two numbers nobody screenshots
Every ad a brand runs on Meta is public, and so is the date it started and whether it is still running. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that is losing. So run length is not trivia. It is a decision somebody already made with their own money, after looking at numbers you will never see.
An ad that has been live since May was reviewed by a real person and kept.
The three-pass read
Open the Ad Library, search a competitor, and filter to All ads so the dead ones show up too. Then read in this order.
- Start dates. Anything past sixty days has survived a review.
- Repetition. When the same sentence sits under six different pictures, they have stopped testing the message and started testing the image. That sentence is their answer.
- Absence. Sort the openings by what each one does to a reader: a claim, an accusation, a question, a price. Then look for the move nobody is making.
What the gaps are worth
A hundred ads is rarely a hundred messages. We pasted 33 ads from one clothing brand and came out with 21 distinct openings, and a single move carried 16 of the 33. That brand had decided.
Not one of the 33 put the reader inside a bad moment before selling. Zero. The business reading that run sold one thing, a wool sock, so damp feet at three in the afternoon was theirs to write and that brand's to miss.
Your competitor's gaps are the cheapest ad ideas you will ever get, and the only ones nobody is bidding against you for.
The reading is the easy part, and you can do all three passes by hand this afternoon. Turning what you find into eight or ten openings for your own product, each one tied to the move it came from so a win tells you something, is the afternoon.