Spy Services for Facebook — A Selection of the Best Tools for Affiliate Marketers
Before launching ads on Facebook, it is necessary not only to prepare consumables, an offer, and a catchy creative, but also to look into what competitors are advertising: this is needed to stay up to date with trends and improve campaign flows, saving time and budgets on testing.
Spy services help affiliate marketers and e-commerce representatives see what ads are being launched in the market in just a couple of clicks. We have compiled a selection of the best solutions for you that allow tracking ad publications specifically on Facebook.
What are Spy Services and Why are They Needed
Spy services are tools that help find competitors' ads, analyze their ad campaigns, track engagement and trends, and look for new campaign flows. They help webmasters and media buyers learn more about the desired market segment and what is working right now.
Key features of spy tools:
- Creative search — analyzing the search results will show what formats are used in your niche: single static images, video creatives, or carousels; what approaches are used, and what offers are trending.
- Analysis of text content and CTA — take a close look at the formatting and length of the text, whether there are emojis, what tone of voice is used, what is promised in the offer, what pain points are pressed, and how they encourage making a purchase or visiting the website.
- Identifying landing pages and sales funnels — you have the opportunity to go through the user journey from start to finish to see how products are promoted in your niche. From the first touchpoint to the final product on the website.
- Identifying converting GEOs. If an offer is scaled to several countries, and the campaigns themselves last more than a week, this indirectly indicates a profitable campaign flow.
- Finding campaign flows. With the help of spy services, you can find out not only what creatives competitors use, but also whether there are pre-landers in the funnel, what the landing page or app looks like — essentially seeing the entire flow that can be adapted and replicated.
Why you should use spy services before launching ads on Facebook:
- the opportunity to learn more about the target audience of the ads, including user preferences and demographics
- rapid hypothesis testing, which helps during storms and regular social network updates
- saving time and money on testing ad campaigns — you can see what definitely doesn't work
- finding new trends and approaches to adapt and use them for your own goals
- finding burned-out flows and evergreen offers, which will help avoid repeating mistakes and find ads for future promotion.
Thanks to spy services, you can track how offers are promoted in similar niches, what hypotheses competitors are testing, how effective their ads are, and how the target audience reacts to their advertising.
Top 5 Spy Services Tailored for Facebook Ads
All services for viewing competitors' ads work on the same principle — they take information from the public Facebook library (Meta Ad Library), and also scrape ad publications in user feeds through extensive networks of accounts. Such tools provide roughly the same set of search filters, so you can choose based on ease of use and subscription cost.
Tyver
Tyver is a spy service for analyzing Facebook ads that helps search for competitors' ad publications and analyze them to find insights and improve campaign efficiency. The tool was originally designed for webmasters, so the main focus is on finding campaign flows and analyzing approaches.
When searching for campaigns, you can view the visuals, description, button link, as well as statistics on reach, gender, and age of the target audience (this is only available in ads for EU countries). Information is also available on the date of the first ad launch, the duration of the ad spend, and the search for similar ads by Facebook page, domain, or IP address.
Pros:
- daily database updates
- coverage of up to 91% of all Facebook ads
- over 20 search filters
- 100+ GEOs
- ability to find similar ads
- translation of campaign text content
- creating folders to save and categorize creatives by topic.
Cons: in the free version, most of the ads will be hidden, as will similar ad campaigns.
Service features: a large database, filters for gambling and e-commerce publications. The ability to search not only for creatives but also for landing pages, domains, and apps.
Pricing: from $0 for small projects with a full set of filters but a limited ad database, up to $119 per month with the full database, as well as information on promotional posts.
Adheart
Adheart is a spy service that helps analyze competitors' ad campaigns to launch ads taking best practices into account. The tool provides access to a large library of current creatives to react faster to market changes.
What viewing an ad publication looks like:
You get access to ad parameters — information about the author's page, placement date, number of domains, link to the offer, search rating (which shows how quickly the post is scaling), reach by GEO, age, and gender of the target audience.
Pros:
- user-friendly interface
- advanced search that includes over 15 parameters
- deep campaign analytics
- ability to track mobile app promos
- availability of a search rating.
The service will help translate the ad, as well as help save ideas by categorizing them.
Cons: severe restrictions in the free demo version that prevent fully testing the service, presence of limits on the number of searches.
Service features: availability of a creative uniqueizer, ROI calculator, cloaking checker, and UTM generator, a large selection of verticals for affiliate marketers.
Pricing: from a free demo version to $89 for a monthly subscription, depending on the number of unique searches, the availability of AI tools, and early access to new features.
BigSpy
BigSpy is a multi-platform spy service with a large ad library for tracking and analyzing ads and researching niche markets. The tool provides one of the largest databases on the market, helping to find inspiration for promotion in any niche.
Upon authorization, the service asks you to choose one of three categories — e-commerce and branding, gaming apps, and non-gaming apps. The number of filters is small:
In the ad information, you can find out about the lifespan of the publication, GEO, language, creative size, on whose behalf the ad was launched, and how many similar launches exist. In the paid version, creative analysis will additionally be available, which helps to understand what exactly hooked the users, what emotions it evoked, what phrasing is most often found in converting publications, and how effective the viewed ad is.
Pros:
- availability of semantic and visual search, which allows finding ads not only by keywords but also by description or image
- large database volume
- ability to subscribe to an advertiser to receive notifications about new creatives
- availability of a library with your saved ads.
Cons: absence of affiliate verticals in the search, which can complicate finding suitable offers, outdated interface, filters do not always work accurately.
Service features: the ability to generate a prompt for creating a creative based on a competitor's image; you just need to copy the text and drop it into your favorite neural network.
For example:
What photo ChatGPT created for us:
BigSpy also has an idea-copying feature that helps you avoid creating an ad from scratch and instead use ideas that are already working well, adapting them to your offer.
Here you can add keywords, a description, or a domain, choose the language and copy type, and after analysis, you can export a document with the top 1000 results for your query. This feature is only available when paying for the most expensive VIP subscription at $3000 per year. For solo affiliates or a small team, this feature is not particularly necessary, but for large companies that constantly test hypotheses and drive traffic to different verticals, it will definitely come in handy.
Pricing: from $0 to $75. The free plan has a limit on the number of search queries (up to 5 per day) and ad downloads, and lacks online support.
AdSpy
AdSpy is a spy service with one of the largest libraries of Facebook ad campaigns. The global coverage of ads allows you to analyze worldwide tendencies and stay up to date with trends.
The service offers the ability to search by text, comments, links, and affiliate networks. Despite its outdated design, it is hard to compare with AdSpy's ad volumes; it is perfect for analyzing offers and creatives.
You can peek at the text, creatives, reactions, number of comments, target audience gender, and ad GEO. If the page leads to a website, the service will show a screenshot of it and information on the links:
If the website has redirects, this information will also be available:
Not in all ads, but an analysis of the ad's technical characteristics is often found:
Pros:
- availability of search by offers
- ability to reveal the structure of a campaign flow
Cons: high price, not entirely user-friendly interface, ads irrelevant to the query sometimes appear.
Service features: search by comments, ability to bypass cloaking to see the real funnel.
Pricing: 1000 impressions per 1 account for free, then $149 per month.
Meta Ad Library
Meta Ad Library is a universal free spy tool available to any user. Of course, the number of filters and analyzed information is inferior to paid tools, but the service can be considered as an alternative.
In the Library, you can select the GEO, ad category, and enter keywords. Viewing is available not only for active but also for inactive ads, and in the filters, you will find languages, advertisers, platforms, media types, and impressions by date.
You can familiarize yourself with creative versions, which countries the campaigns are broadcast to, the age range and gender of users, reach, and see the link to the website or app.
Pros:
- no search limits
- direct data source
Cons: fewer filters than paid services, no ability to bookmark an ad, cannot track competitors on an ongoing basis, some data disappears over time.
Service features: well-suited for basic competitor analysis, finding ideas, and creatives for inspiration.
Pricing: free.
How to Use Spy Services Effectively
To get the maximum profit from working with spy services, we advise adhering to a few rules.
- Analyze, do not blindly copy competitors' solutions. Carefully study the ad formats — what triggers are used, how the creative is built, what color schemes prevail, what font is chosen, what the tone of voice of the text content is, how long the description is, whether emojis are added, and what the CTA of the publication is.
- Identify campaign flows. Look for long-running campaigns, pay attention to ads that are actively launched in several GEOs. Adopt ideas, remember the nuances of promotion, and the specifics of adapting the funnel to different countries.
- Study funnels and landing pages. Go through the journey from the ad to the offer to study the solutions used by competitors to advertise the product. The ability to see the entire funnel significantly increases the chances of successfully replicating the campaign flow.
- Pay attention to the lifespan of campaign flows. Monitor competitors so as not to make their mistakes. Also, during analysis, there is a chance of finding non-obvious evergreen offers.
Conclusion
Spy services are not a panacea or a magic button that will help get rid of unprofitable ad campaigns and earn all the money in the world. First and foremost, they are a powerful analytical tool that you need to know how to use. You should not neglect the analysis of the received information. For your ads to convert, it is not enough to copy a competitor's creative. You need to build a full-fledged product promotion strategy so that your offers also generate a positive ROI.
Frequently Asked Questions
A spy tool is an instrument that helps monitor competitors by analyzing their ad creatives and traffic sources. It plays a crucial role in finding profitable campaign combinations, building a marketing strategy, optimizing the sales funnel, and reducing the time spent on testing hypotheses.
Yes, free spy tools for Facebook do exist. The safest and most transparent tool with no trial versions or limitations is the official Meta Ad Library. There, you can explore competitors' ads, apply filters, and view details of ad publications, including their launch dates and offer versions.
Using spy tools is completely legal. These tools only analyze public ads that are available on advertising and social networks, without violating data privacy.
