Facebook will soon be expanding its ad transparency feature, which will make it much easier for tour operators to spy on their competitors’ Facebook advertisements.
Facebook first tested the feature in October 2017 when it rolled the program out for Canada. The main goal is to have transparency in political ads, but fortunately, the feature will apply to all pages that advertise on Facebook. Since the start of the program, Facebook’s goal has been to launch the program to the entire world by summer 2018, before the US midterm elections in November. It now estimates that the feature will be available worldwide in June.
During the testing period in Canada, Facebook ad transparency only showed a page’s ads that were currently running, and this will be the case when the program reaches the rest of the world. However, pages that run ads that are related to federal elections will have a searchable archive of all ads that have been run since the start of the ad transparency program. But who knows; perhaps one day non-political ads will also have a searchable archive, making it even easier to check up on your competitors. For now though, you’ll have to just regularly check in and see if they’re running any ads.
Let’s say you run bike tours in Los Angeles. You have a great Tourism Tiger website, and your TripAdvisor page has better reviews than other bike tour companies in the area. But somehow, your competitor seems to be getting more business than you. Now you can check out their marketing tactics by going to their Facebook page, clicking on the “Ads” section, and seeing the ads that they’re currently running, even if you’re not in the ad’s target audience.
This will make it much easier for tour operators to understand and learn from their competitors’ marketing strategies.
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