How To Find Top-Performing Facebook Ads

There are millions of combinations for Facebook ad targeting options. You can target by demographics (age, gender, location, platform), interests, behaviors, connections or use custom lists for retargeting. Finding the top-performing combinations can be tricky, but here’s how you can easily do it in seconds:

How to Find Best Performing Facebook Ad Combinations

Polymer Search allows you to go beyond your top Facebook Ads, examining all your data and automatically letting you know about your top-performing Facebook Ads. 

Step 1 - Export Your Facebook Ads Data

Start by exporting your Facebook Ads data into a spreadsheet. You can do this by going to the Reports menu in Ads Manager. Make sure you’re customizing your columns and adding breakdowns with the data points you want to examine.

Step 2 - Upload and Analyze Your Data

Now, you can sign in to Polymer Search (or create a free account) and click on “Add Data”. Drop your spreadsheet anywhere, or search through your local files and cloud services to find the CSV file.

Allow for a few seconds for Polymer’s AI to analyze the data, then click on the “Launch Polymer App” yellow button.

Step 3 - Use The Auto Explainer Feature

Now that your CSV file is converted into an intelligent app, all your ads data have been assimilated and automatically grouped, making it easy to find the best and worst performing ads.

Go to the top menu and select “Insights” -> “Explainer” like this:

This will open the auto explainer menu.

Step 4: Find Top Performers

Since your data is automatically tagged, all you need to do is to select the metrics you want to measure and how you want to break them down. This allows you to find the top-performing ads on any metric you choose.

Since Polymer has already tagged your data, all you need to do is to select the metric you’re interested in to find the top performers along with their characteristics:

You can dig deeper by adding metrics, setting up a date range to find historical top performers, and customizing the number of results you want to get. 

How to Find Your Best Performing Ads on Facebook Ads Manager

If you’re only looking for your best-performing ads, you can find them with Facebook Ads Manager. 

Just follow these steps:

1. On Facebook Ads Manager, select Campaigns, Ad Sets, or Ads.
2. Click View Charts to see the ads’ performance visually represented.
3. Select the chart you want to see to identify top performers in Performance, Demographics, Placement, and Delivery

Although limited, this is an effective way of quickly identifying top-performing ads in-app with very basic data and customization options.

How To Find Your Competitor’s Top-Performing Ads

Looking for inspiration? It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on what your competition is doing and how it’s performing to find insights that can help your Facebook Ads outperform theirs. 

Here are a few ways to find your competitor’s top-performing ads:

1. Use Facebook’s Ad Library

The Facebook Ads Library is a database of all active and inactive Facebook ads, open for anyone to use. The library lists all of the ad’s variations, along with basic information like their running date, their impressions, their cost, and their target landing pages.

Facebook Ad Library allows you to search for your competitors by name or keyword, seeing when their pages were created, and all the ads they’ve run. You can also find more competitors by filtering by country and platform to find more companies targeting the same audience.

2. Follow Your Competitors

Following your competitors’ pages is a great way to make sure you’re up to date with their Facebook Ads strategy while you browse Facebook.

Start by listing all of your competitors, and find out which ones have Facebook pages. You can start a spreadsheet detailing their current Facebook strategy, and document with screenshots of every ad you get from your competitors to examine later. 

3. Get Insight From “Why Am I Seeing This Ad”?

If you’re getting your competitors’ Facebook ads, you can find out more about them by clicking the three dots icon at the top right corner of the ad, and selecting the Why Am I Seeing This Ad? option.

Facebook will give you an explanation of why you are considered a fitting audience for the ad, which can give you insights into the kind of audience your competitors are targeting. 

4. Find Inspiration With Swipe-Worthy

Swipe-Worthy is another great free resource to help you find ads from competitors and other companies in your (or any) industry.

You can use the search bar on the home page to choose the niche you’re interested, and select Facebook Ads to see all ads for that niche. You can search among their ads, find out why they worked, and keep up with new ads by signing up for their newsletter.

5. Use Paid Tools To Spy The Competition

Paid tools allow you to skip a lot of the manual and time-consuming labor of sorting through competitors and ad lists.

Tools like Ahrefs and BuzzSumo offer great choices for Facebook Ad analysis, along with advanced features to determine your competitors’ marketing strategies and their level of success.

Final Thoughts

By using a tool like Polymer Search, you’ll be able to identify the top performing ad combinations through segmenting the audience by demographics and interests. It’s a powerful way to optimize your ROAS by laser targeting the audience who are interested in your product. 

Just upload your first Facebook ads dataset and try it out yourself!