Have you noticed you can see all the ads any Facebook page is currently running?

If you haven’t seen it yet, Facebook rolled out a new feature last week that allows you to view the active ads of any Facebook page. It’s an effort to be more transparent for its users. Marketers and businesses are going a little mad!

How do I see them?

It’s really simple. On desktop just go to any Facebook page and the bottom tab on the left-hand side will be ‘info and ads’.

“What? My customers and competitors can see all my ads, and I can see theirs?” I hear you panic. Well…yeah! But it’s not that much of a problem!

Users aren’t going to look!

Depending on your industry, most of your customers and potential customers aren’t going to look at your ads. The majority of people aren’t that savvy or are too lazy to bother. If you’re running re-targeting ads to existing customers or users that added to the basket but didn’t purchase and offering a discount code to them, then yes if someone chooses to view all your ads they’ll see the discount code. But if they’re willing to go to all that effort to get a discount, they wouldn’t have paid full price in the first place! And they’re obviously browsing with intent to buy right then and there, so you’re technically hitting them with your ad for free and hopefully converting. It’s just not that bad.

Won’t my competitors copy me?

Well, possibly. But the competitors that you need to worry about will probably already have been spying on your ads using the many tools that are available to do that anyway. You simply can’t spend your time worrying about that. Keep your ads fresh and regularly updated, and you’ll give them a job to keep up with what you’re doing. And hey, perhaps sometimes you’ll be struggling for inspiration and you can look to the big brands and see what they’re doing. There’s no way of seeing who an ad is targeted to, or even how well it’s performing. So relax, this just means we need to be more creative and on the ball than we already were.